How do I make all contractions auto correct to have the apostrophe?

eddie95 · November 14, 2019, 1:58pm

Currently, when I type ‘cant’ it doesn’t autocorrect to ‘can’t’, is it possible to do this, as in Office?

anon73440385 · November 14, 2019, 2:22pm

Hello

add a replacement definition in Tools -> AutoCorrect -> AutoCorrect Options ... -> Tab: Replace and add
Replace cant
With can't

and click button New and finallly OK

Hope that helps.

eddie95 · November 14, 2019, 2:23pm

Thanks for your reply. I began doing this, I was just hoping there might be a way that it would recognise all these similar contractions and add the ’ automatically in all of them.

eddie95 · November 14, 2019, 2:27pm

also, that method doesn’t seem to be updating them either for some reason!

anon73440385 · November 14, 2019, 2:38pm

I tested before posting - so please mention your operating system and LibreOffice version and carefully check that language setting in dropdown Replacement and exceptions for language matches your actual document language.

Tested using LibreOffice:

Version: 6.3.3.2, Build ID: a64200df03143b798afd1ec74a12ab50359878ed
CPU threads: 8; OS: Linux 4.12; UI render: default; VCL: kde5;
Locale: en-US (en_US.UTF-8); UI-Language: en-US, Calc: threaded

anon73440385 · November 14, 2019, 2:48pm

In fact I find that a bad idea, because without a real grammar checking this will produce unintentional results (cant could be also a noun or even a verb).

keme · November 14, 2019, 2:49pm

To base autocorrect on similarity is not a good idea. In my view, uing autocorrect for this is a bad idea anyway, but if you must, at least make sure that you decide for yourself what you want to automate.

So, why don’t you want the “similarity engine”?

Cant and can’t are both valid words. They don’t mean the same.
The same goes for won’t and wont.
A similarity correction engine would probably catch “rant”, but I guess you don’t ever want to write “ran’t”.

eddie95 · November 14, 2019, 2:54pm

Hi, it’s LibreOffice 6.3 and Windows 10 and the document languages match. Another issue I’m having if you wouldn’t mind lending a hand, is whenever I highlight anything I’m not sure how to turn highlighting off again, clicking the icon for it doesn’t seem to do anything?

keme · November 16, 2019, 6:47pm

Note that entering an autocorrect item will not correct previous mistyping in your document, only future edits. Use find/replace to correct existing content.

Also I apologize to Opaque about my previous comment which was misplaced. Intended target was the question, not this answer. Anyway, it seems that we agree on the issue as commented so hopefully no offense was taken from it