Consider Paragraph Spacing on Table Borders

OpenOffice.org 2.0

Document - ID	Specification Owner	Last Change	Status
	Frank Loehmann	15. October 04	Final
Conforms to	
Applies to	Writer
Task ID(s)	i34939
Category	Bug

Abstract

OOo 2.0 now considers spacing and indent set for left / right and for above / below paragraphs when calculating the entire spacing to a table's border. Those two sorts of spacing (paragraph and table) are now being added instead of only considering the distance to border set in the table's properties. This new feature improves the Microsoft interoperability and is also set as default for new created Writer documents to improve the export to Microsoft Word format.

But this new feature has some side effects for new created documents: Writer automatically assigns paragraph styles "Table heading" and "Table content" to a table's heading and content. Due to paragraph spacing, set in those styles, the spacing between the last paragraph at the end of a cell and the table border is now much bigger than in OO 1.1. Especially single line paragraph content will not be shown vertically centered within the table cell anymore.

Therefore the attribute spacing below paragraph is set to 0cm in the "Table contents" and "Table heading" style.

i-Team Members (The specification owner is part of the i-Team)

	Name	E-mail Address
User Experience	Frank Loehmann	frank.loehmann@sun.com
Development	Andreas Martens	andreas.martens@sun.com
Quality Assurance	Michael Rüss	michael.ruess@sun.com
Documentation	Uwe Fischer	uwe.fischer@sun.com

Approved for Implementation

	Approved by	Date
User Experience	Frank Loehmann	15 Oct. 04
Development	Andreas Martens	15 Oct. 04
Quality Assurance	Michael Rüß (MRU)	07 Feb 05
Documentation	Uwe Fischer	18 Oct. 04
String Review		

Document Change History

Rev. Level	Change	Initials	Date
1.0	First Draft	FL	13 Oct. 04
1.1	Finalization	FL	15 Oct. 04

Contents

Glossary	1

1	Motivation	1

2	User Scenarios	1

3	Goals	1

4	Dependencies	1

4.1	Technical Dependencies	1

5	Competitive Analyses	2

5.1	Microsoft Word 2003	2

5.2	OpenOffice.org 1.1	3

5.3	OpenOffice.org 2.0 EA (without changes described in this specification)	4

6	Detailed Specification	5

6.1	G11n	5

6.2	Migration	5

7	Future Tasks	5

8	Notes	5

Glossary

Term	Description
none	

Motivation

Writer automatically assigns paragraph styles "Table heading" and "Table content" to a table's heading and content. Due to paragraph spacing, set in these styles, the spacing between the last paragraph at the end of a cell and the table border is much bigger than in OO 1.1. Especially single line paragraph content will not be shown centered anymore. Therefore the paragraph spacing below is set to 0cm in the "Table heading" and "Table content" paragraph styles.

User Scenarios

User A is used to work with Microsoft Word. She is evaluating the new early access (EA) version of OO.org 2.0 and wants to create a simple new document in Writer. She creates a new table in OO.org 2.0 EA. After she has inserted the table she keys in the data. She is wondering why the first row is now centered, bold and italic. She doesn't want that, because her data does not have column headers. She selects the entire first row and chooses bold and italic to turn off these attributes. Furthermore she selects align left for this row. Now she enters the rest of the data and she is wondering again, because the cell content is not vertically centered within the cell. After finishing the table work, she creates some lengthy text in front of the table. The table is now splitted onto two pages, because the table does not fit on the first page anymore. Later she recognizes that the table now consists of one extras row and that the content has changed with some repeated data from the top. She fails when she tries to fix that problem, , because she is not able to travel the cursor to that row ad when she deletes the content she also deletes content on the beginning of her table.

Problems:

Automatically assigned styles for table headings with attributes bold, italic, centered and spacing below the paragraph (0,21cm).

Repeating headers for tables are set by default.

Spacing (0,1cm) to border defined for top and bottom of tables.

Goals

Improve Microsoft import

Improve Microsoft export

Improve usability for users familiar with Microsoft Word

Dependencies

Technical Dependencies

Microsoft export has to be checked.

Competitive Analyses

Microsoft Word 2003

Word does not use different paragraph styles for heading and body of a table by default. Nor do they automatically repeat headings on page breaks. Furthermore the table margins (left, right: 0,08" (0,2cm); top, bottom: 0") are different from those of OO.org 2.0 (0.1 cm for all).

Illustration 1 Word table margins

Illustration 2 MS Word default table on page break

OpenOffice.org 1.1

OO.org 1.1 creates totally different formatted default tables. Often those magic default formats are not intended by the user and the user does not know how to get rid of those. The new format paint brush of OO.org 2.0 gives the opportunity to clone direct formatting made for a single cell to other cells or the whole table.

Illustration 3 Default table in StarOffice 7 Writer - wit repeated rows, styles for headings and table content. Margins are set to 0,1 cm for left, right, top and bottom.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 EA (without changes described in this specification)

The new adding of spaces from paragraphs and table border spacing results in too big default spacing.

Illustration 4 Content of single line rows is not centered

The changes were introduced by the following interoperability feature for Writer:

Illustration 5 New compatibility option to improve import and export of MS Word documents.

Detailed Specification

Only the following change is made:

Parent of "Table contents" paragraph style is changed from "Text body" to "Default", to set the paragraph spacing below to 0cm. The "Table heading" styles will inherit this change automatically, because "Table contents" is the parent paragraph style.

The current spacing to table border is kept unchanged.

G11n

none

Migration

Old OO.org documents (OpenOffice 1.1 and prior sdw binary files) are not affected by the new behavior for tables introduced by the Microsoft Word importing feature.

Future Tasks

none

Notes

none

Consider Paragraph Spacing on Table Borders

Page 5

http://specs.openoffice.org/writer/tables/Consider_Paragraph_Spacing_on_Table_Borders.sxw

Frank Loehmann

2004-10-08T10:58:01

Frank Loehmann