Bug 154082

Summary:	FILEOPEN DOCX: section starts after the top margin of the first paragraph in the section
Product:	LibreOffice	Reporter:	Justin L <jluth>
Component:	Writer	Assignee:	Not Assigned <libreoffice-bugs>
Status:	NEW ---
Severity:	normal	CC:	jluth
Priority:	medium	Keywords:	filter:docx, notBibisectable
Version:	Inherited From OOo
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
See Also:	https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=153964 https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50068
Whiteboard:
Crash report or crash signature:		Regression By:
Bug Depends on:
Bug Blocks:	104520, 107738

Description Justin L 2023-03-09 01:31:15 UTC

If a section starts with a back-ground coloured paragraph and a top margin of 100pts, you would expect to see a large coloured block above the text. And normally you do, except at the start of a section - where the block is just "empty".

This is especially noticeable when the section has columns. The other columns don't start "at the top of the page", but "after the 100pt top margin". In other words, they are automatically aligned with the first paragraph's text.

This is a fundamental difference between LO and MS Word. See bug 153964 where this was initially discussed, and is demonstrated by
attachment 185823 [details]: sectionStart.odt.

To reproduce:
-open attachment 185749 [details]: columnMargin15.docx

It should look like the compat15 version in attachment 185748 [details].


This is not bibisectable. I don't care if earlier versions imported the DOCX as page-columns instead of section-columns. The point of the bug report is about sections, so use sectionStart.odt if you want to do any bibisecting.

Comment 1 Justin L 2023-03-09 01:36:49 UTC

It is probably worth nothing that the PDF is not actually a perfect representation of how it appears in MS Word 2019 - apparently what you see is not what you export to pdf. (Mainly the background colouring is off. The focus in any case is the position of the text relative to the top of the column, which is accurately shown in the PDF.)

Comment 2 Dieter 2023-04-06 13:55:13 UTC

I confirm it with

Version: 7.6.0.0.alpha0+ (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: 1e9f4de320f67d1218c710bcee1969a2324c6888
CPU threads: 4; OS: Windows 10.0 Build 19045; UI render: Skia/Raster; VCL: win
Locale: en-US (de_DE); UI: en-GB
Calc: CL threaded

Steps (as far as I could understand report):

1. In a new document insert a section with two columns and coloured backgrond.
2. Place cursor within section and change spacing above paragraph to 3,5 cm

Actual result:
Spacing above paragraph is white.

Expected result:
Spacing above paragraph has colour of section background.

Additional information
Can't see, that this behaviour is limited to docx-files, so I would change bug summary.

Comment 3 Justin L 2023-05-15 15:13:21 UTC

(In reply to Dieter from comment #2)
> Can't see, that this behaviour is limited to docx-files
You are correct. I found bug 50068 discusses this.

However, that is a "lets change ODT implementation discussion, while this is a DOCX compatibility discussion. The two are highly intertwined, but lets just leave them separate for now.