How do I force LO Writer to export 2 spaces between sentences?

[KenFHill]

I like to use 2 spaces between sentences so my old eyes don’t have to work as hard while reading. I changed options in auto-correct and in the spelling dictionary. So I don’t get flagged with “errors” while in LO.

However, when I copy text or save as RTF – then bring into other text editors all my double spacing is gone. If I paste as plain text, the double spacing is retained but much of what I do in LO is in tables and tables are not retained pasting as plain text. (Other text editors : msWord 2003 and RightNote.)

Is there some other LO setting I need to change?

Thanks.

@ajlittoz : Thanks for the info. Looks like an EN SPACE is about the equivalent of 2 spaces. It means I have to do a final search-replace before either copy or save as. Seems like tedious work for what appears to me to be a program bug. (msWord copy/paste keeps the double spacing as I expect.) I despise justification so the caveats you mention won’t bother me.

[ajlittoz]

If you are consistent across your document, a single search & replace operation should do the trick (with Replace All button).

[ajlittoz]

As far as I know, no, probably because this is a US-habit (not an international or “universal” one) dating back to the mechanical typewriter era. This double space badly interacts with the line break and justification algorithms causing sometimes wrong decisions.

Some national rules require the space following a strong punctuation to be larger than usual interword space. This is not implemented in Writer.

As a workaround, you could replace all your full-stop + double spaces by full-stop + a “special space”. The “special space” could be one of EN QUAD U+2000, EM QUAD U+2001, EN SPACE U+2002 or EM SPACE U+2003.

Since they are not a SPACE U+0020, the export filters should not merge or replace them. However, be aware this will introduce other problems:

• a line break can no longer occur between full-stop and the “special space” nor between the “special space” and the next character: this results in bizarre line breaks and justification should the group word-full stop-special space-word be the last in a line.
• a “special space” will not expand or shrink to satisfy justification

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