Hyphenation of something like this if the language is undefined

[jsv1]

Most of the time, I use two languages in my documents, my native language and English.

My personal opinion (you may disagree, of course) is that working with multiple languages in Writer is not convenient. This is not an attack on Writer or LibreOffice - working with text in multiple languages is also inconvenient, for example, in InDesign (and I’m sure Word, but I don’t have it).

So I prefer to use the [None] “language”, and so I use the following settings:

Tools > Language Settings > Languages:

• Western = [None]
• Ignore system input language = True

The problem is that words in my native language, Russian, are quite long. Not that long as in German, but still much longer than in English. And this means that spaces between words in justified text are sometimes very wide. They look ugly and make text hard to read.

So I would prefer to enable some kind of hyphenation for the [None] language which I use. Of course, since [None] actually mean “undefined language”, this hyphenation cannot be smart or even proper. Normally, you cannot hypehante a word just in arbitrary position. For example, you cannot separate “w” and “ord” in the word “word”. But such kind of silly hyphenation will be OK for me. Is it possible somehow? (I need this for my personal documents. I don’t care that such hyphenation is wrong. I just want to make it more convenient for myself.)

Or maybe there is something different that will eliminate the problem of too wide spaces in two-language Russian-and-English texts with justified text alignment?

[Grantler]

Why don’t you create two different paragraph styles, say one in Russian and one in English. For each of the languages you can easily use one of them. Hyphenation could do its work on both languages…

[jsv1]

Because I use more than one paragrpah styles. I don’t want to duplicate each (or most) of them.

[ajlittoz]

Remember that styling is kind-of “semantic marking”. The styles denote a different significance. Since language is a very important attribute, it is worth duplicating the styles.

From personal experience, a well structured document can be formatted with at most 15 paragraph styles, including the Heading n family. If you use more, think over your document again.

[LeroyG]

My question: There is a way to create a new language (say: A), and it own hyphenation rule (whichever word place)?

[anon87010807]

You can manually hyphenate text by pressing Ctrl+- in a particularly long word. The hyphen will only show when the word actually breaks at that spot and will be hidden otherwise.

[jsv1]

Your idea is interesting, Leroy. Why not simply merge English and Russian dictionary files. I should try this.

[anon87010807]

Hyphenation uses its own files, the dictionaries aren’t going to help you.

[jsv1]

It was very easy to guess which files should be merged: hyph_en_US.dic and hyph_ru_RU.dic. Maybe you or Ajlittoz can suggest how is it possible to register a new language? So instead of using hyph_en_US.dic with incorporated hyph_ru_RU.dic into it, I will use something like hyph_jsv.dic and there will be JSV in the list of available languages.

[ajlittoz]

Working with multi-lingual documents requires user-discipline (aka. a strong and strict methodology).

What this boils down to is a consistent use of styles, not only the well known paragraph styles by also character styles.

Configure Writer for your common language (Russian in your case) so that the built-in existent styles behave as usual.

For the paragraphs in the other language, derive your paragraph styles, changing only Language: attribute in Font tab. By “deriving” the paragraph styles instead of creating them anew from scratch, all attributes (except Language:) are inherited from the primary style. Then, when you modify/tune the primary style, the derived style is also changed, keeping in sync with the “primary”. You can have such Text Body (Russian) similar to Text Body except for the language.

For words diferring from the paragraph language, you can do the same with character styles. This can somehow be relaxed if you’re working with “numerous-lingual” documents instead of bi-lingual ones. To avoid having many many character styles (one for each language), you can just set language to None with the consequence that the foreign words in the paragraph will not be hyphenated correctly if at all.

[jsv1]

Well, thanks, but I already know all these things. I just consider them not very convenient to use for myself. What I’m looking for is some kind of brute-force hyphenation or wrapping that will not require to use two real languages instead of [None].

[anon87010807]

You can also use a character style with only the language changed for entire paragraphs in the secondary (less used) language in the document so that you don’t get a proliferation of styles.

[ajlittoz]

@anon87010807: Writer presently has a limit of a single character style application. Consequently, using a character style to change the language (which is anyway a good idea) prevents application of Emphasis, Strong Emphasis or any other without losing language change.