[Libreoffice-bugs] [Bug 127725] New: Find by format is fundamentally broken by extraneous formatting details in Writer

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.documentfoundation.org]

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=127725

            Bug ID: 127725
           Summary: Find by format is fundamentally broken by extraneous
                    formatting details in Writer
           Product: LibreOffice
           Version: 6.2.5.2 release
          Hardware: x86-64 (AMD64)
                OS: Linux (All)
            Status: UNCONFIRMED
          Severity: normal
          Priority: medium
         Component: Writer
          Assignee: libreoffice-bugs at lists.freedesktop.org
          Reporter: alexis.dinno at pdx.edu

Description:
In recent versions of LibreOffice Writer (since at least 6.0, if not
5-point-something) find/replace using formats is unusable, because unmodifiable
extraneous formatting details are included in the find formatting which
preclude a positive match.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open blank document (or existing document with formatting as I describe
below), and type a few lines of text.
2. Select a few words within the text, and set font to 'Adobe Garamond Pro' and
style to 'Bold' (on my system there is no such font)
3. Open the Find & Replace dialog, leave the 'Find' and 'Replace' fields blank.
4. Click 'Format...'
5. Select the 'Font' tab, and set font to 'Adobe Garamond Pro Bold' (naturally
you may, or may not have this font on your system, bug works with other font
values), set style to blank (i.e. *not* to 'Regular', 'Italic', etc.), and
click 'OK'
6. Pay close attention to the formatting descriptor below the 'Find' field: it
contains kerning, indent left/right, and from top/bottom values that you did
not explicitly set.

Actual Results:
Find or Find/Replace using Format... does not result in any positive matches.

Example: I want to search for instances of the font 'Adobe Garamond Pro Italic'
(of which there are many instances in a legacy document I have, although this
font is not installed on my system), and replace with 'Adobe Garamond Pro'
(which is installed on my system) and with the 'Italic' style.

However, instead of searching only for text formatted as 'Adobe Garamond Pro
Italic', LibreOffice—without any other input on my part telling LibreOffice to
do so—will only search for 'Adobe Garamond Pro Italic, Kerning 0 pt, Indent
left 0.0 inch, Indent right 0.0 inch, From top 0.0 inch, From bottom 0.0 inch'.
It is seemingly not possible to edit these extraneous formatting directives.
For example, while I can go to the Indents & Spacing tab in the Search for
formatting dialog, and set, say, a value of 1.0 inch for Indent left (which is
just as useless a search value as 0.0, since my indentation varies throughout
my document), I cannot change Indent left to a blank value without it
immediately reverting to '0.0 inch' when I tab to the next field or click OK.

This extraneous formatting results in zero positive hits with Find and with
Find/Replace.

Expected Results:
 andI expect Find and Find/Replace using Format... to not unavoidably introduce
extraneous and unremoveable search parameters which effectively break searching
by format.


Reproducible: Always


User Profile Reset: No



Additional Info:
I have written out the above example on ask.libreoffice.org here:
https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/208926

I have included a screenshot and in the comments an LO confirms the bug ***on
.deb packages only.***

I am using LibreOffice Writer on Ubuntu 19.4, although I saw the same behavior
on Ubuntu 18.10.

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