Pasted text in Writer starts new line with one word from a sentence?

[Geekomatic]

This seems to happen when I copy from an email. As shown in a similar example below:

*"not in their best interests. Both children love it here in Australia,

want

to remain living here, & have settled & acclimated to our new country.

Both

are marvelous students- Ben is planning to go to university for a career

in

medicine, Olivia is in year 5 & has been in the gifted students program

for

the past two years. They have their friends, school life, and we all have
absolutely adopted Australia as our own country. I have been working,
full-time, as technology specialist at my job since Sept. 2008 & have
won
awards for outstanding service."*

In the email it is copied from, the sentences look normal, but now in Libre Office Writer, I can’t seem to find any way to mass-fix this? Sometimes there are two- three words before it jumps to the next line. Is there a way to fix this in one go? I have many like this now.

Cheers

[ajlittoz]

What you see is the consequence of formatting in your email application.

If you use a dedicated one like Thunderbird or Outlook, a newline is inserted only at end of paragraphs and copied text behaves like you expect: justification takes care of long paragraphs to display it on several lines and text will adapt itself if you change margins.

If you copied text from an internet browser, email content has already been processed to be sent as HTML, usually meaning that it has been divided in “screen lines” with an explicit line break at end. Although HTML allows for auto-adapting text (the <p> element), many email viewer in browsers heavily use scripting to do the formatting, which breaks the HTML features. When tou copy such a text, LO has no way to decide weather the line break is for justification or really represents a paragraph break. In doubt, all newlines are interpreted as paragraph breaks. This comes in addition to normal justification: your text may contain long lines which will be justified by LO as a full line plus a few words on the next one (explaining why you have such silly short lines).

As a consequence, there is no automated way to fix this. All you can do is to manually remove the undesired paragraph marks.

Eventually, if email formatting follows some conventional rule (like having an empty line between paragraphs), you can design a script or an LO macro to transform your text.