Custom Hyphenation – Add a word to Hyphenation Dictionary?

English
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#1

Hi there,

I would like to be able to add rules for hyphenating certain words in a document.

For example, in one document, the word “Ramakrishna” occurs hundreds of times. Libreoffice doesn’t hyphenate the word well; it usually breaks it at Ra-makrishna, but preferably we would have it hyphenated at Rama-krishna; with an option also for Ramakri-shna.

I haven’t found any way to do this other than to put soft hyphens in every instance of the word—not a very elegant solution, and makes proofreading the text on screen annoying.

I found the mysterious hyph.dic file, but it is some kind of code—no actual words are in there. I can add words to the spelling dictionary; can I add words to the hyphenation dictionary?

Thanks!

#2

Simply set the hyphenation rules to not hyphenate after the first or second letter.

#3

Thank you, Floris.

But I don’t want that rule applied to all words. I want other words to be able to be hyphenated after two letters; it’s just that one word that is the problem.

I note that if I select the word Ramakrishna, and then go to tools—>language—>hyphenation, it gives only one option: Ra-makrishna. I can’t move the hyphenation point. So the algorithm is unable to hyphenate it in any other way.

#5

There is a very good reason to not hyphenate after the first or second letter in normal text: many guides disapprove of it because it looks ugly.
A better suggestion is offered by @ajlittoz.

1 Like
#4

Since the presently only known way to do it is inserting soft hyphens, have you considerd using Edit>Find & Replace?

  1. prepare the first occurrence of Ramakrishna in your document as Rama<soft_hyphen>kri<soft_hyphen>na. Copy it (into clipboard).
  2. in Edit>Find & Replace, enter Ramakrishna into Find:
  3. paste into Replace:
    Note you won’t see the soft hyphens nor any space/mark to tell you there are special descriptors in the word
  4. Replace All
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#6

Thanks, Ajlittoz.

Yes, that is one workaround I had considered.

And if you are correct that this is the “only known way to do it”, then there’s my answer! I was hoping there was a way to edit the hyphenation dictionary. I know in some other software one can do that.

Since the text may, in future, be exported to another software for more precise typesetting, I was reluctant to use this method.

I did discover that there is a way to “hide” the soft hyphens; right now they are showing on screen. I’ll just have to remember to delete them all before resetting the type in other software.

Finally, is this something that deserves a feature request? What do you all think? Sounds like it’s not an issue for most people…

#7

The soft hyphens will only be visible in a PDF or printed when they occur at the end of a line.
We strongly advise you to turn on display of non-printing characters and things like soft hyphens while you are writing or editing your work, just like builders keep the scaffolding while building a house. It doesn’t look pretty, but it’s an invaluable help because you can see what you are doing.

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#8

Right, I agree. It’s just so ugly when proofreading, to see all those soft hyphens!

Thanks for your help & best wishes to you.

#9

When proofreading, just turn them off.

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#10

If you said what version you are using, I missed it, but the Writing Aids page in the online help for ver. 7.3 says that when entering a word in a dictionary, you can enter an equals sign (=) at the place(s) where hyphenation should take place. An equals sign at the end of the word prevents automatic hypenation.

#11

Thanks for that, Paul. Currently version 7.2.

Where does one enter words into the dictionary?

#12

Go to Tools > Spelling and click on the Options button. Select a dictionary and click Edit. Then enter the word. Put hyphens in where the word should be divided, or leave it undivided and put an = equal sign at the end to indicate that it should never be hyphenated.

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#13

Thank you, Paul! At long last I now understand how to add hyphenation to the dictionary. That works perfectly. Brilliant!

#14

Glad to be of help.

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