How to insert an em-dash

I would like to use em dashes and en dashes in text, but don’t see a way to insert them with the keyboard. How can it be done? I am typically using Liberation Serif as the font, but not always- sometimes it’s Droid Sans or something else.

I see that I can put a space before and after two regular dashes and auto-correct will change it. But I usually don’t want a space before the dash.

What is your operating system?

Windows 10

Since a number of versions, LibO have autocorrects that do not need space before them: those surrounded by colons.

:---:

will turn into an m-dash as soon as you type the second colon while

:--:

will give you an en-dash and

:-:

a minus sign.

Thank you, RGB-es: I didn’t see this happening when I tried it. I am running 5.1.6.2 (I had to downgrade because some stuff got broken in a newer version). Do you know which version implemented the behavior you describe?

It was implemented on 5.0:

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/5.0#Emoji_and_in-word_replacement_support

Many thanks, RGB-es. Hmmm… why isn’t it working? Have to check it on another machine or two.

This worked for me!

You can find how to do it in the Writer’s guide page 80 https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Publications#LibreOffice_Writer_Guide

Viola! It works!

THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

could you post a more specific link?

Here is the link to the specific page in Writer manual for 6.4: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/images/a/a4/WG64-WriterGuide.pdf

For convenient input of many characters absent in standard layouts in Windows, try Ilya Birman’s layout.