Multiple text alignments on one line in Libre Office

Question

Is it possible to have multiple text alignments on one line in Libre Office? Something like:

|                                 |
|left         centre         right|
|                                 |
|                                 |
|                                 |
|                                 |

If this is possible, how can such behaviour be achieved?

Answer 1

This is possible using tabstops. It's a little bit cumbersome because you'll have to calculate the position of the "centre" tabstop yourself.

In the following example, i'm assuming you're working with a4 paper in portrait format, the width of the entire page is 21 cm. Assuming left and right margin is 2 cm each, the "content area" has width of 17 cm. If you're using any other format, just adapt the values accordingly.

Now, to define the appropriate tabstops, do the following:

1. Open Menu "Format" -> "Paragraph..."
2. Select the "Tabs" tab;
3. In the "Position" entry field, enter "8,50" as position of the centered tabstop;
4. From the "Type" radio buttons, select "Centered";
5. Hit the "New" button. In the list beneath the "Position" field, you'll see a new entry with the position of the new tabstop.

6. Repeat steps 3 to 5 fort the tapstop at the right: in my example, you would use "17,0" as position and "Right" as type.

   Now, the paragraph style dialogue should look like this (numbering according to the steps above):

   

7. Now, click the OK button. As only visible result, you'll see the tabstop markers in the ruler at the top:

Now, just start to type. When hitting Tab, you can continue typing centered text, and with another Tab right-aligned text.

If you need this kind of paragraph style more often, just create a custom paragraph style.

To insert tabstops even more quickly, do the following:

1. Select the tabstop type (left, centered, right, decimal) using the little selector button at the upper left corner:

   

2. Double-click on the top ruler at the position where you want to place the tabstop.

3. The "Tabs" dialogue will open, showing the newly inserted tabstop and its position in the tabs list at the left.

See also:

• Apache OpenOffice.org Wiki on Tabstops (Getting started);
• Apache OpenOffice.org Wiki: Controlling TabStops using paragraph styles

Answer 2

I've used the insert table function to add cells that can be justified within each cell and then right click and choose table properties and change the style of line to "none".