Use center alignment in header, left alignment in body

[JustCallMeBug]

Hi,

I'm trying to write an outline for a story and would like to center the header and left align the rest of the text. However, it seems to apply alignments to the entire document. How work around this?

(also why is it like this? seriously it should change based on where you cursor is/highlighted text like everything else ahhhhh)

Thank you in advance.

[RoryOF]

It works perfectly when one uses Styles. A good description of their use is given in

Writer for students (several languages)

PDF at
http://openoffice-uni.org

[Bill]

Hi,

I'm trying to write an outline for a story and would like to center the header and left align the rest of the text. However, it seems to apply alignments to the entire document. How work around this?

(also why is it like this? seriously it should change based on where you cursor is/highlighted text like everything else ahhhhh)

Thank you in advance.

How did you center the header? You've told us what you tried to do, but not how you did it. Assuming that you actually mean "header" and not "heading", the paragraph style applied by default in a header has a centered tab in the center of the header, so one way to center the header would be to click the left end of the a header and press the Tab key. A second way to center the header would be to click anywhere in the header, then click the Centered icon on the Formatting Toolbar. Either way would center the text in the header but would not affect any text in the body of the document.

If you meant "heading" and not "header", then you would center the heading by clicking in the heading then clicking the Centered icon on the Formatting Toolbar. If that centers the whole document, then you probably tried to start new paragraphs using Shift-Enter instead of just Enter. Enter starts a new paragraph, but Shift-Enter starts a new line in the same paragraph.

[Zizi64]

However, it seems to apply alignments to the entire document.

I suppose that, you have applied one Paragraph Style only (the Default one), and you have tried to modify the properties of that one Paragraph Style. Use more than one Styles for formatting your documents.

And please upload a small, ODF type sample file here.

[keme]

In Writer, the text Alignment is applied per paragraph.

If you are not formatting by way of styles, and your efforts towards adjusting alignment always applies to your entire document, it is most likely because you have everything in one single paragraph. This happens when you insert a linefeed in place of a paragraph break, either by pressing shift+enter instead of simply the enter key, or by copying some "malformed" content from elsewhere (PDFs are frequent sources of those linefeed entries).

Select menu item View - Nonprinting characters to enable a graphic rendition of the end-of-line characters (and also other "invisibles" such as space and tabulation characters).

• A pilcrow, ¶, signifies the end of a paragraph. The next line of text is in a new paragraph.
• A "return arrow", ↵, signifies newline. The next line of text belongs to the same paragraph.