[Solved] Grid misalignment in Writer

[Akram]

When setting up forms in Writer I use the page grid, set to a frequency of 2 steps per 1 cm in both dimensions. You would think that with this setting the positions and sizes of controls would all be X.00 or X.50 cms. But I've noticed that something odd is happening and in two recent documents the positions and sizes have been X.08 and X.58, and X.37 and X.87. In other words, the objects are respecting the frequency of the grid, but they are out of phase with it. This happens in only the horizontal dimension; the vertical dimension works as expected.

I suspected that the page might be register-true. It wasn't. I thought the margins might be causing an offset, but in both cases they were 2 cms on all four sides, and the paper size is A4 which is a whole number (21) of cms in width. I checked that I was not aligning to paragraphs and made sure the objects were anchored to the page itself. I have watched a few videos for tips, done the usual searches of both this forum and the wider WWW, and cannot find an explanation.

The only relief of the problem came when I switched from LibreOffice back to OpenOffice. Although the objects were still offset when I first opened the document, once I moved them in OpenOffice they obediently snapped to the grid. Thank you Apache.

I've concluded at this point that there is a bug in LibreOffice, but the only Bugzilla report (63320) of something similar seems to have been dismissed as operator error. So now I suspect that I'm doing something wrong, or not doing something right. Does anyone have any suggestions, other than sticking to OpenOffice?

[RoryOF]

Your text formats may have an "automatic" indent set. Look at /Format /Styles and Formatting, press first icon from left and right click on any paragraph format giving you the offset. on Indents and Spacing tab uncheck "Automatic".

[Akram]

Brilliant! Thank you very much. I treated all applied paragraph styles as you suggested and everything now seems to be OK. However, I also notice that Text Body and Title now seem to have first-line indents of 1 cm and 2 cms, respectively, which were not there before, and which do not appear in their style parameters, so obviously there is something for me to study here. I will get a few hours sleep first though. Thanks again.

PS: It's very late at night here, and I misread your post. I checked automatic, rather than unchecking it. So that explains the first-line indents I see.