Not capitalizing after a sentence ends in a quote

When a sentence or paragraph ends with a quote (") the first word in the following sentence or paragraph isn’t being capitalized. For example:

“Want to watch the video?”

“no. I’ve already seen it.”

How is this corrected?

Hi @Ted-W8TTS,

I’m using LO 3.5.4.2 on Ubuntu 12.04.1. I’m able to reproduce your results – here are the exact steps I took to test:

  • Open up LO Writer

  • Type the following sentence verbatim (don’t use the SHIFT or CAPS key for letters – all capitalization seen is automatic)

     The belligerent dog said “woof! Woof!” his barking continued incessantly. He would not stop.
    

Note that both the first ‘woof’ and the word ‘his’ both follow a double-quote mark, and neither is automatically capitalized.

I did the same test using single quotes:

The belligerent dog said 'woof! Woof!' his barking continued incessantly. He would not stop.

I wonder if this is the expected behavior from the program designers. Do you know what other word processing programs do in this situation? A few programs we could check would be AbiWord, MS-Word, WordPerfect, and Pages.

In the text-messaging application of my Android phone, here’s how the automatic-caps are applied:

The belligerent dog said “woof! Woof!” His barking continued incessantly. He would not stop.

Sorry maybe I’m wrong, but words or phrases inside a double quotes used to be a literal reference.

The @qubit1 first sample is the right form to me. After close the double quotes, is the same paragraph with no point.

Capitalization has behaved this way since OpenOffice. This is, if anything, a newspaper convention.


I write novels, lots of dialogue. Dialogue convention is punctuation within quotes ends a sentence unless immediately followed by punctuation (eg: “Damn!”, he said.).

I only use Writer, so without a toggle I have no reason to switch to Libre. I only check in once in a while to see if this (and a couple of other issues) have been addressed.

I know that Word Perfect does this capitalization as I expect it to.

Maybe related to → Bug 54409 - Autocorrect not operating next to quote or quotation marks

@Ted-W8TTS,

Still looking for an answer here? fdo#54409 as mentioned by @manj_k seems like it’s pretty applicable, so my gut feeling here is to resolve this Question as BUG FILED.

Thoughts?