How to make Open Office format correctly...

[katzdvd]

Trying to edit a flyer. There are lines with bullets, asterisks, etc. in front of them. Problem is, when the next sentence is typed underneath, the alignment is off - like this;

* The sale will be Saturday at 3:00 pm.
Please bring all items early.

See what I mean? The word "Please" is under the bullet, & there is no way I can get it to space over to put it under "The". It stays "stuck" in that spot. I looked thru all the formatting options, maybe I am missing something.

Any ideas?

[DrinkOrDie]

I see. Sometimes word processors can be quite uncooperative.

It looks like the problem is that everything you are showing is part of the same paragraph. I mean the formatting applies to all of the text. So, the next line is going to begin right underneath the first character which is the asterisk.(*)

It's hard to tell you how to fix it, without seeing the entire document. However, if the asterisk is at your left page margin, then select everything to the right of it, leaving the asterisk alone. Then format that text as it's own paragraph, and set the margin for that paragraph a little to the right. In other words, indent the paragraph, but leave the asterisk out of the paragraph, so it stays right where it is, at the left margin of the page. Like this:

[left page margin]* [begin indented paragraph]The sale will be Saturday at 3:00 pm.
Please bring all items early.[end para]

Perhaps the asterisk and the text that follows it, is already part of an indented paragraph like this:

blah blah blah text text text. More text and more
And maybe more text followed by an indented paragraph:

* The sale will be Saturday at 3:00 pm.
Please bring all items early.

If it's already an indented paragraph like the last example, I usually just say fr@ck it and put my cursor before the "P" in "Please" and space it over 'till it lines up.

I hope that maybe I got you thinking. Remember that you can choose any text in the document and format it as it's own paragraph, then set that paragraph to start at a certain point from the left, or you can center it, or set it to the right. All text that follows from the beginning of that paragraph will simply wrap underneath the paragraph left margin.

[DrinkOrDie]

You know what? forget my examples. They don't post how intended them to show up. They look nothing like they did before I clicked "post" so maybe I know nothing about this. It's because when you post here, the tab key is ignored, and so are spaces before text on a new line.

[katzdvd]

Hi DrinkOrDie!
Thanks for the reply. In your example, if you put the words in the quote tag like I did in my first post, I believe the formatting will show like you intended it to. I will work with it some more, taking into account what you have mentioned.

As you said, word processors can be quite uncooperative at times. That dang word is stuck under the asterisk, & no spacebar input will move it at all. You would think if I turned off all the "auto formatting" junk that they so helpfully provide with these programs, that I would be able to make it work, but no....

[DrinkOrDie]

Can you simply delete the asterisk, then retype it outside the pargraph? That's assuming you have some kind of indicator showing you where the paragraph begins and where it ends. It's really difficult to speculate on how to fix it because I can't see how your document is formatted.

[katzdvd]

Yeah, I know it is kind of difficult to understand without actually seeing the document. The one I am having a real problem with is a resume', & I don't want to post that... The flyer is simple enough, I can create that in wordpad & fix what I need to, but the resume' is more involved.

It must be something with "auto formatting" or something along those lines, but as far as I can tell, I went thru all the options & turned all that stuff off.

[katzdvd]

Well, I came up with a "workaround". To get the spacing that I needed, I typed in "periods", although any character would work. I then selected the periods & changed the font color to white, thus making the "filler characters" invisible. (or whatever the background color needs to be) Not a fix, but it does the job.

Slick, huh?!?!