How can I change the length of spaces between words?
Not the entire spacing of the font (expanded or condensed), only of spaces between words.
here they say it is not possible
Why ? Explaining the background of your wishes may help we to help you.
The most stupid, but working variant - “Find and replace…” (Ctrl+H). “Search for:” - type 1 space in that field, “replace with:” - type 2 (3 or more) spaces in that field and press “Replace All” button.
Also “replace with:” - 1 space and More options-Format(Replace)-Position-Scale width
And a personal remark: choosing a good font has a bigger impact and better effect than tuning the length of spaces 
Right: I could also search for all spaces and then change the font size of my selection. Nice!
Yes, Jean-Baptiste, I needed to reproduce an article that I published (I have the permission to do it for my personal needs), because the publisher is not going to provide the original file. And I wanted to keep the page numbers, and the paragraphs positions as the original, for reference reasons.
I also agree with Cloph, I searched all fonts, and only after having the most similar to the original paper I tuned it up. Thanks all for the help.
It is true that there is no special setting to set a different spacing for the spaces in LibreOffice, but there is a workaround that is almost as good, depending on your workflow/your needs.
- Create a character style and name it “spacechange”
- open the Styles and Formatting window (either toolbar button or with <F11>
- switch to the character styles (second button from the left)
- create a new style by right-clicking the Default style and choosing New from the contextmenu. Assign a name and close the dialog.
- Use Edit | Find and Replace to search for <space> (i.e. enter a space character into the search box), and hit Find all
- with all spaces in your text selected, apply the character style you did create in the first step by double-clicking it in the stylist
- you can now change the spacing by modifying the character style
- right-click the “spacechange” style in the styles and formatting window and choose modify
- on the Position tab pick condensed/expanded spacing as desired
- choose apply to preview and OK to accept the change.
Now this of course only really works when the text is already in its final state, otherwise you would have to keep assigning the character style over and over again.
1 Like
Thanks Cloph. This workaround is suitable for my needs, which are exactly formatting a text in it’s final state. I needed to shorten the lenght of spaces. Your procedure is working perfectly. One small issue: in the Position tab I needed to use Rotation/Scaling commands, instead of Spacing commands.