Inappropriate word splitting in Justified formatting

Since the latest update, I’ve noticed random words will wrap/split in a word doc.

  1. This only seems to happen in Justified formatting.
  2. Doesn’t affect the whole doc consistently
  3. Randomly leaves the space between words at the end of the justified line (the cursor doesn’t snap to the last letter of the word at the end of the line as it normally does.)
  4. Splits words i.e.: if the last word on the line is “it” it will leave the “i” at the end of the line and begin the next line with the “t”. This is not an attempt to hyphenate, it just stops the word at the margin and begins the next line with the rest.
  5. Sometimes, the end of a line will go past the margin observed by the rest of the text in the paragraph rather than split or wrap. I’ve added a screenshot demonstrating a word breaking the Justified margin, with a return following it. The word “waits.” is the culprit. It should be bumped to the next line, but remains with the rest of the sentence.
  6. This will happen in a fully Libre generated new doc file, so it’s not an importing issue.

I’ve tried clearing the formatting for the paragraph as well as the whole document and resetting it, but the split word recurs. It takes some mystical and random number of return-and-deletes throughout the paragraph to get the word to completely snap to the justified format properly.
I’ve only had this problem since the last update. Anyone else notice this/have this issue? It’s weird and annoying as these are book chapters so having to comb through looking for these weird split words is a huge pain.

Thank you

And which is the LO release now? What was the previous one? Mention the exact number and OS name.

Do you mean you’re editing a .doc(x) document instead of an .odt?

Sorry, it doesn’t demonstrate anything! View>Formatting Marks was not enabled nor visual clues from the same menu. The only thing which can be deduced is you’re likely practising direct formatting despite your statement, as is shown by your use of Default Paragraph Style.


Please reopen your question (click on below it then on the “pencil” icon to enter edit mode – don’t answer with a comment at this stage so that all information is grouped at a single location without needing scrolling) to provide requested details. Help>About LO contains full technical info.

Attach a sample document corresponding to the screenshot for analysis and diagnostic.

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Does it have the same issue in safe mode, Help - Restart in safe mode - Continue in safe mode?

Maybe this was caused by what was pasted in from a web page. I found that pasting ChatGPT chats into LibreOffice text document worked well, but when I pasted in from a not logged in session with Microsoft’s CoPilot the exact same thing was happening! At the end of a line, for example, it would place “a” and starting the next line would be “nd”!

I discovered that the original text, even if pasted into a plain text editor without formatting did the same thing. They had actually created all of their spaces with non-breaking spaces!! A regular expressions search for whitespace found nothing. I had to find and replace all, by copying in a “space” from the source text, and replacing all of them with a space typed on the keyboard.

Enter \s in the Find field to find all types of space