Hi,
It seems LibreOffice doesn’t support document wide “soft-hyphenation”. Am I right?
Thanks,
If you refer to automatic hyphenation, then it applies to paragraph, not to document. And all paragraphs have their styles and manual formatting. Styles are organized in a hierarchy with root element Default Style.
If you want to define autohyphenation to apply to all text in document, then the proper way is to define hyphenation at Default Style, and make sure that child styles don’t override the setting. It’s actually rare when all text needs hyphenation; e.g., captions are usually not hyphenated, even if text body is. So, you may further set some styles to override the setting. Or if you have some more fine-grained preferences in that regard, you may avoid touching Default Style and only define the property at those styles you need.
Another (much worse!) approach is to apply manual formatting to all the text: select all, then go to paragraph properties and set hyphenation to all selected text. New added text then will have a copy of that formatting… but I urge you not to do that. Using styles allows you to create good-looking and manageable documents with much less effort, only some initial learning is required.
Another (much worse!) approach is to apply manual formatting
True, manual formatting is a bad habit. But:
a) hyphenation is not formatting;
b) hyphenation is exactly one of few cases where manual control is better than automatic.
To do it manually, select the entire text or a part of it, go to Tools → Language → Hyphenation and insert hyphens as appropriate.
Please read the OP question carefully. User doesn’t tell about partially hyphenating, the goal is “document wide” hyphenation.
Also, the thesis that “hyphenation is not formatting” is at least questionable. To use hyphenation or not to use is exactly formatting decision. What may be deemed “not formatting” (but I doubt here either) is whether you put the soft hyphen in this specific place in the word, which is aids to autohyphenation feature that may fail occasionally.
Yes.
LibreOffice Writer supports “document wide soft-hyphenation.”
But this phrase does not make sense.
Soft hyphens are manually entered, so “document wide” does not really mean anything.
.
Thanks Folks,
I was thinking in terms of a typesetting question where fully justified text, in the context of aesthetics or appearance, either drags word spacing noticeably wide or jams words too tightly together. An example of the latter would be when there is no space between a period and the next capital of a new sentence. Or dealing with “widow” or “orphan” paragraph lines at the beginning or end of a page.
It does happen in the best of publications and It seems is harder to deal with multiple skinnier text columns. My text is an imported page wide novel therefore it is easier to deal with, but with the proviso that there are a lot of pages.
I think soft-“hyphening” is an inherent routine that runs in the background principally to “flow” text in these situations by auto-hyphenating longer words to either open up or compress a line of type. Or maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about.
I did Google soft-hyphen and found reference to ><, /, #, html, and many words in courier font that no sane person has any business going near of.
If I have a tip for anyone manually doing this: I still retain the instruction from my high school typing teacher when we were banging away on our Smith-Coronas (and there was only courier font); always double space after a period at the end of a sentence and before a new one. This allows for compressing down to one space between sentences or adding a space to drag out an overly tight line of text.
Thanks again,