Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 23323
Not possible to specify negative margins in header/footer
Last modified: 2013-02-07 22:37:21 UTC
In the Footer tab in Format|Page there are Left Margin and Right Margin options. If the user tries to specify a negative value, the negative value is reset to zero. However, negative margins for header/footers do make sense and I think they should be accepted by OOo.
Reassigned to BH
Since the margins for headers/footers are set relative to the page text area, it does make sense for a header/footer to have a negative margin. There would simply need to be a small change to the conditional statement that causes negative values to reset to zero. I don't know how to code, but the logic would be something like: If (margin < 0) If (abs[margin] >= pageMargin) margin = -pageMargin else(no change) The other option would be to have the header/footer margins set relative to the page rather than the page text area, but I don't think this would be such an easy change.
Further information that may be of interest. As an experiment I've manually edited the header-footer-properties under page-layout, changing the fo:margin-left and fo:margin-right values to negative values to see how OOo 2.0.4 would interpret them. For footers, OOo 2.0.4 interprets them correctly and displays the footer with "wider" margins than the main body of the page. However, when a negative left margin is specified for a header, the header is not rendered at all. So if you do decide to change the user interface to allow negative values for header margins, be aware that this may also require changes header display code to make them look right.
As a workaround, note that although the header and footers don't allow negative margin values, the paragraph styles attached to them do; so it is possible to get the desired effect by editing the "Header" and "Footer" paragraph styles. The tab stop position on the right hand side doesn't quite work correctly when you do this, so you need to slide it out manually; but it is do-able.
To grep the issues easier via "requirements" I put the issues currently lying on my owner to the owner "requirements".