About Paragraph Spacing
In OOo Writer, you can define spacing above and below paragraphs, and you can set a line spacing between the lines of a paragraph. As with other formatting attributes, you can apply them to the selected paragraphs as direct formatting, or you can change the Paragraph Styles.
Look at the default paragraphs in the following image:
Line spacing
If you want a 1.5 line spacing for the second paragraph, you can right-click somewhere inside the second paragraph to open the context menu. Then choose the formatting attribute of your choice from the menu. See the following image, where the new 1.5 line spacing is already applied:
As you can see, the 1.5 line spacing is created by adding 50 percent more interline lead than normal, below every line of the paragraph, including the last line.
The command in the context menu applied a direct formatting. The same is true for the optional toolbar icons on the Formatting toolbar, and for the Indents & Spacing dialog box from the Format - Paragraph menu. All direct formattings can be reset by the Default Formatting command, as the following image shows:
Here a right-click in the second paragraph opened the context menu, and the Default Formatting command did reset the direct formatting of that paragraph.
Further down in the context menu, you can find the Edit Paragraph Style command. If you change the Paragraph Style to apply formats, you can change many paragraphs at the same time, in the same manner. All paragraphs in our example text document have the same Paragraph Style named Default. You can see the name Default near the left edge of the Status Bar below the document. When you change attributes of the Paragraph Style, all paragraphs in our document will show the changes.
Choose Edit Paragraph Style from the context menu and go to the Indents & Spacing tab page. See the following image:
Here you can change the formatting attributes for the Default style (see the dialog's title bar). Select a double line spacing and click OK. As you can see, there are some more choices for different line spacing options in the dialog box. The OOo Help tells you about the meaning of the other options.
When you now try to reset the formatting to the default, using the Default Formatting command from the context menu, you will not see any difference. That is because the Default Formatting command resets the formatting to those values that are defined by the current Paragraph Style. And you just changed that style.
To reset all changes that you made to the Default style, click the Standard button in the Paragraph Style: Default dialog box as shown in the above image.
Spacing between Paragraphs
You can also set the spacing above and below paragraphs. You either change that formatting for all currently selected paragraphs directly (use Format - Paragraph menu), or you change the Paragraph Style as in the above image.
If you sometimes still have to work with proprietary documents, for example Microsoft doc files, you may notice some differences how paragraph spacing is done in OOo versus Microsoft Word.
For example, the spacing above a paragraph is not applied in Microsoft Word for a paragraph on top of a page. In Writer, that paragraph keeps its spacing above.
When paragraphs have a spacing above and a spacing below assigned, you will see another difference. OOo Writer adds both spacings together, while Microsoft Word just applies the bigger one of both spacings.
Two different worlds with different history. For compatibility reasons, you can choose how Writer applies those spacings. Open a Writer document, then choose Tools - Options - OpenOffice.org Writer - Compatibility. You see the dialog box as in the following image:
By default, all options are set to ensure the best compatibility within the OpenOffice.org text document formats, past and present. If you open a Microsoft Word document and the paragraph spacings look odd, you might want to change some options for the current document.
OpenOffice.org does the best it can to bridge the gap between the different types of text documents, you can open and save the proprietary Microsoft documents, and you can fine-tune a lot of compatibility and formatting options.