I select the whole text and then I select automatic hyphenation; but automatic hyphenation is not implemented.
I have to proceed paragraph by paragraph, footnote by footnote in order to implement automatic hyphenation.
Is there no way to auto-hyphenate the whole text with a single command?
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isn’t that precisely what I did?
You didn’t mention your OS name, LO version nor save format. The latter is most important here. Also how do you format your document? If you proceed with direct formatting instead of using styles, it is likely that @PKG’s solution won’t work 100% because direct formatting takes precedence over styles. This will be the case if you already fiddled with the setting on individual paragraphs.
Hyphenation is also dependent on the language. If text language is None, you’ll have no hyphenation at all. So, go to Default Paragraph Style Font tab and check that the language is set correctly and you have the dictionaries for this language.
OS: Windows 10 64
Libre: 7.5.5.2
I have multiple languages in the document and texts have been copied and pasted from hundreds of PDF-files and notes made on various devices.
I wish I knew what you meant by Styles - I downloaded the user manual, but the part about Styles wasn’t clear to me - or I haven’t understood it yet.
Managing multi-language documents is quite tricky and needs an extensive thought about paragraph and character styles. Design of these styles is complex if you want to avoid unnecessary multiplication of similar styles.
Text copied from PDFs does not carry any formatting information, notably no language tag.
Styles are understood by newbies as a collection of typographical attributes and other geometric properties. This may be satisfying for a casual use of Writer. But the most fruitful approach to styles is to consider them as some semantic tagging (i.e. you designate the importance or significance that paragraphs, words, pages, … have for you, the author. You care for visual aspect in a second time only. This approach when correctly followed totally separates contents from appearance.
If you come from Word, the ubiquitous nature of styles is quite difficult to accept because Word has only paragraph styles and an incomplete feature for pages called “section”. In Writer, practically everything can be controlled by styles: pages, paragraphs, words (the category is called character), frames (for image insertions) and numbering (the category is called list). The only object which are not (yet?) under styling are tables (don’t be abused by the so-called “table styles”; they aren’t styles in the traditional sense).
I will read into Styles when I am done with the current project. I come from WPS, which is very user-friendly, but I was shocked to learn that automatic hyphenation is not possible, which renders it useless for the purpose of publication.
Automatic hyphenation is definitely possible, or the setting wouldn’t be there. But you have to assign a language to the text, or the automatic hyphenation won’t work.
Styles are basically bags of formatting information, intended to help you work faster and more efficiently. It’s a kind of office automation. You can select a paragraph that serves as a heading and apply Helvetica, 18pt, and Bold separately with the toolbar buttons. But it’s much easier if you define a style or modify an existing one to have those values, then double-click the style name to apply the style to that paragraph. Then for every heading, you have to perform a single action to give it that formatting. And if you ever want to change that formatting, all you have to do is modify the style, then the formatting will adjust automatically. It’s also useful when you want to have your text read to people with poor eyesight. Text to Speech software has great difficulty interpreting “18 pt Helvetica boldface” but can handle “Heading style” quite well. Writer has a lot of special inbuilt styles, like heading styles, styles for indented paragraphs, and so on.
It’s very important to remember that when Writer interprets the formatting for viewing on-screen or printing, manual or as we call it here direct formatting overrides formatting defined in styles. So you can make some words in a paragraph in italics or boldface using the toolbar buttons. But when you apply manual formatting on a big scale, you can totally mess up your document.
