As this has often heard people complaining about the lack of dotted and dashed line types in Calc and Writer, I have started to implement it (139 votes on i#8275). Kohei told me that these line types are heavily used by the Japanese administration in their forms. Even thought I am in the early development of this feature, this post exposes the progress.

What is working:

• Dotted lines have been added to the border types selection list and the border selection control has been updated according to it.
• Writer tables and Calc now show dotted lines as well as the other writer objects supporting borders (frames, pictures or pages for example).
• Some ugly display in the border selection control has been fixed (i#86716)

What still has to be done:

• Loading (saving) the dotted lines style from (to) the different file formats
• Make the current changes more generic to support other kinds of lines like dashed lines.

This is one step to improve the interoperability with Word and Excel documents, but only the dashed and dotted types will be handled as the others can't be stored in OpenDocument. ODF uses the XSL-FO border style...

Now here is the time for the screenshots:

Dotted borders in Calc

Dotted borders in writer

Here are two screenshots to compare the borders format dialog before and after the fix.

Border format dialog before the fix

Border format dialog with the fix

Given the fact that the development is still not finished, there is still no patch available, but please be patient: it will come soon...

EDIT: the patch is available on Go-oo git repository.