Can formatting be made to behave as though the cursor were never within a word?

[HULF]

From e.g. the “Italic” page at help.libreoffice.org:
“If the cursor is not inside a word, and no text is selected, then the font style is applied to the text that you type.”

This is the way I would like font styles to always behave (unless text is selected, in which case the existing behavior is fine).

The effect I want the option to remove, quoting from the same page, is:
“If the cursor is in a word, the entire word is made italic.”

Is there a setting I can change somewhere to set this behavior?

[anon87010807]

The behavior that you describe is ancient, it was already the default for Word 6 for Windows (the oldest version that I have worked with) back in the nineties. Some thought went into that decision, and I don’t know why you’d want it to be different. Just press Ctrl+Left or Ctrl+Right to get out of a word, then you can work in the way you like.

[ajlittoz]

I don’t think so.

The feature has been offered as a convenience shortcut for the most frequent operation in proof-reading to avoid having to select a word.

When you type fresh text, your cursor is always at the end of a “word”, thus applying a character style or pushing a toolbar button has the behaviour you’re looking for. Of course, if you want to add characters in the middle of a word, you must wait for the end of typing, select the portion to “highlight” and apply the style. Not straightforward, but the only way.

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