With the substantial changes in OOo 3.0 regarding list levels (that have caused a bit of trouble elsewhere), Impress seemed to be going along quite nicely, except for the issues when converting between ODF1.1 and tentative-ODF-1.2 documents.
Anyway.
But then along came someone who was using the rulers in Impress (which are disabled by default – you get them inside the “View” menu), complained about extensive brokenness, and I started to have a deeper look:
The left image shows status quo (red line showing position of the ruler controls), note that the cursor is inside the last, most indented paragraph. The right image shows the behaviour as it was before 3.0 (the strong black lines added, to better visualize ruler control position). Moving those ruler controls then gives this:
Again, left side new, right side old behaviour. Apparently now, the ruler controls only add an offset to the already existing indentation of the outline, whereas before, they directly controlled bullet position and left margin of the text. What’s more, the lower control does not change text left margin, but first line indent – something just utterly useless in a presentation outline. Not exactly an improvement in usability, in my not so humble opinion. This is now fixed in ooo-build master.
That said, the fix has a tiny little fly in the ointment: changing the bullet/text distance needs to modify the entity that determines the whole bullet/numbering appearance (the SvxNumBulletItem, sadly therefore only atomically modifiable – a decision that might need re-assessment), which in turn leads to an outline format that will no longer adhere to e.g. changes in the master page styles. This is no different when changing said distance in an unfixed vanilla OOo, via the Bullets & Numbering dialog; and clearly a lot less annoying than the ruler behaviour there – but it still warrants mentioning, I guess.
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