Grid (lines and spacing)

History

• Last update: March 4, 2008 by tora

Parent project

This project is a part of the parent project jsdp2007.

Sub-projects

This project includes the following sub-projects:

• Grid display line
• Wrong position of ruby text
• Relations among lines and characters

Goals

This project aims at solving one of the Asian specific problems with OpenOffice.org Writer, especially interoperability with Microsoft Word.

When Writer loads a Word file with a choice of 'Specify line and character grid' in the Page Setup dialog, its text layout gets greatly broken.

Facts	Expectations

The picture of Facts is taken with pure OpenOffice.org 2.3 while the picture of expectations is taken with OpenOffice.org plus accomplishments of this project.

Sample files

• pagestyle_sample1.doc

Background

Word has four choices for grid layout while Writer has three.

Word	Writer

The current mapping among choices upon loading a Word file:

Choice of Word	Choice of Writer
No grid	No grid
Specify line grid only	Grid (lines only)
Specify line and character grid	Grid (lines and characters)
Text snaps to character grid	Grid (lines and characters)

Writer's Grid (lines and characters) differs from Word's Specify line and character gid, though. The lack of this choice in Writer brings the problem.

Approach

To solve the problem, we have tried to add the fourth choice to Writer. The new choice is preliminarily named 'Grid (lines and character spacing)' or, shortly, 'Grid (lines and spacing).'

New choice in Writer

With addition of the new choice, an import filter has been enhanced to recognize it as below.

Choice of Word	Choice of Writer
No grid	No grid
Specify line grid only	Grid (lines only)
Specify line and character grid	Grid (lines and character spacing)
Text snaps to character grid	Grid (lines and characters)

How it works

The fourth grid type 'Grid (lines and spacing)' manages the amount of room between side-by-side characters. The amount of room, called Character space, is determined by an equation, subtracting the value of Standard font size from the value of 'Max. base text size.' The Standard font size equals to the size of Asian text font for the Paragraph style 'Default.'

No grid - for reference

Grid (lines and character spacing) - Scaled Condensed

Grid (lines and character spacing) - Expanded

File format

This attempt of adding a new type of grid layout will need to propose an enhancement to the OpenDoucment File format.

A new keyword 'spacing' for the new layout "Grid (lines and character spacing)" is experimentally added to the element 'style:layout-grid-mode' defined in the section 15.2.21 Layout Grid of "Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.1" [1]

Resources

Three texts have been added to the tab page 'Text Grid'

• Grid (lines and character spacing)
• Standard font size
• Character space

Modules

The following modules have been modified.

Module	Modifications
sw	Adding some controls to the tab page 'Text Grid' Enhancing a way of formatting text layout Adding a new choice to ww8 import and export filters
svx	Adding a helper class for a combination of FixedText and NumericFormatter
offapi	Adding a new choice to com::sun::star::text::TextGridMode
xmloff	Adding a new token 'spacing'

Online help

No text has been added to the online help.

References

• [1] http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=office