Manual autocorrection only recognizes URLs at the end of a paragraph

English
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#1

(As background:) I am currently writing a long academic paper with LibreOffice Writer. For my footnotes I use Zotero (with the LibreOffice-Plugin). Unfortunately, due to restrictions of the RTF-Format, the Zotero plugin cannot insert URLs as hyperlinks. The workaround is to unlink the footnotes and to apply the Autocorrect function (Tools → Autocorrect) manually. Unfortunately, this is not working as expected:

The Autocorrect function only recognizes URLs at the end of the footnote. I was able to reproduce this also with URLs in the regular body of the text. They are only recognized when they are not followed by any letters.

As an example, this URL will be recognized when the Autocorrect function is triggered:

Text, https://example.com.

And this one will not:

Text, https://example.com. More Text.

Am I making anything wrong or is this simply a bug?

// Edit: LO 24.2.4.2, Ubuntu, .odt file format
// Edit2: This post was marked as spam by the community. I’m not sure why and would be thankful for any hint.

#2

Why are you saving RTF? This is a deprecated format (even Micro$oft has dropped support for it). It has limited possibilities, meaning you have information loss when your document is converted to RTF and again when reading it back from RTF.

In addition, Zotero citation management is not well integrated with Writer (or any office suite). For portability purpose, Zotero does all it cooking by itself, only exposing final data to the suite. Consequently, I am not surprised that AutoCorrect does not recognise URLs.

If your footnotes are “simple” footnotes, like comments on your argumentation, don’t use Zotero. Of course, if you have a huge library of citations, Zotero is perfectly legitimate, but be aware that Zotero comes with a load of macros which are triggered at various moments and completely change your added formatting to revert to “Zotero-pure” formatting.

All the citation plugins I know are incompatible with semantic styling and defeat the purpose, causing you to lose control on your formatting.

PS: when asking on AsLO, always mention OS name, LO version and save format.

#3

Sorry, that was a misunderstanding. I’m not saving the file as rtf, but as odt (Zotero is using RTF to insert the footnote). However, I do not think this bug is related to Zotero (I just wanted to give some background information on why this is relevant to me).

Autocorrection does not recognize any other URL which is not positioned at the end of a paragraph (even in a completely new document as part of the main text). You can easily test this with the two examples I’m providing in my original post.

Thanks for the request for further information on LO version, OS etc. I’ve added all of that to the original post.

#4

Works nice here. URL is styled as such as soon as I type a character which can’t be part of an URL, e.g. space or paragraph break. Check your AutoCorrect Options to see if recognition is enabled.

#5

I think the difference is that you’re typing character. My use case concerns the manual application of the autocorrect function to an already existing text.

To reproduce: Copy both text samples to an empty LO document, remove the hyperlinks so you have only plain text (containing the URLs), select the text, go to Tools → Autocorrect → Apply (the wording might be slightly different as I’m not using the English version).

Expected outcome: Both URLs are recognized and converted to hyperlinks.

Actual outcome: Only the first URL is recognized, the second one (with more text before the paragraph break) is not recognized and remains plain text.

Here’s a short recording of my screen (with the German UI, sorry for that!).

#6

Now, I experience the same problem as you. IMHO this is not a bug. The “URLs” not recognised have a syntax error: they end with a period. A period is a separator. If nothing follows the separator, the “URL” is faulty (missing component).

According to this rule, what is surprising is the recognition of a “faulty” URL when the dot is followed by a paragraph break.

#8

My impression is that the Autocorrect function recognizes the period at the end URL correctly as character not belonging to the URL. Consequently, the hyperlink is only applied to the text before the period. This is exactly the desired behavior, I’d say (btw, it also mirrors the hyperlink recognition used here in this forum).

What seems to break the recognition is any space in the same paragraph after the URL.

For example, the URL in this text is correctly identified and converted to an hyperlink:

Text, <https://example.com>MoreText.

While this URL is not recognized:

Text, <https://example.com> More Text.
#10

tdf#162344

1 Like
#11

Thanks a lot for filing the bug report!

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