Right-to-Left Typing in LibreOffice

Most people type in left-to-right direction as most languages such as English use this direction for typing. On the other hand, some languages such as Urdu, Arabic etc. use right-to-left direction for typing. Microsoft Office, LibreOffice and most word processing software are designed to be comfortable for English language users. If English or any other left-to-right language is your default choice of language on your operating system, then you won't have any difficulty typing in English language. But for people who type in right-to-left languages, it can be a little bit tricky to make documents as per their needs and requirements. 

Urdu is my main language, and we are going to assume that we are setting up right-to-left indentation in LibreOffice. While Microsoft Office usually learns that you have Urdu keyboard installed on your computer and it automatically gives you option to change text indentation through ribbon. However, LibreOffice will not give you option to change text indentation automatically and you will have to find and enable it yourself. But first of all, let's learn about LibreOffice. 

What is LibreOffice?

LibreOffice is a free and open-source office suite application. It is mostly famous on Linux distributions as an alternative to Microsoft Office since you cannot natively install Microsoft Office on any Linux distribution. It has all the necessary applications for your office work need but the application naming scheme is different than Microsoft Office. For example, instead of Microsoft Word, you have LibreOffice Writer as word processor. LibreOffice is not Linux only office suite. You can also install it on Microsoft Windows as well as macOS.

Right-to-Left Indentation in LibreOffice

As I have already said, right-to-left indentation will not be available on LibreOffice by default. You first need to enable it from the settings. To achieve that, you need to add your language in the settings. If you are using old version of LibreOffice then you may also need to put right-to-left indentation icon on ribbon. The steps are very easy. 

If you are using newer version of LibreOffice then right-to-left and left-to-right text indentation icons will automatically appear in the ribbon once you have completed steps from 1 to 6. If it does not appear automatically, then there is a probability that you are using previous version of LibreOffice. Well, you can still make those icons appear on the ribbon by following instructions from 7 to 13.

1. Open LibreOffice Writer
2. Go to "Tools" option and click 'Options"
3. Expand "Language Settings" from sidebar
4. Click "Language"
5. Under "Default Languages for Documents" heading, enable "Complex Text Layout" and select 'Urdu (Pakistan)" from drop down menu next to it. 
6. Click OK and restart LibreOffice.
7. Open LibreOffice Writer
8. Go to "Tools" option and click "Customize"
9. Click "Toolbars" tab
10. Then select "Formatting" in "Target" drop down menu on the right side
11. Search left-to-right and right-to-left from available commands on the left side
12. Click arrow keys to add both indentation icons
13. Now, these icons should appear in your ribbon

Once upon a time, I made a video about this when I was using Ubuntu with Unity desktop environment. You can watch that video as well. 

For more tutorials like this, please check our Tutorials category posts.