Preformatted text in Writer: How do I break long words?

[zetta1000]

Hello,

I want to display script output in LibreOffice Writer. I created a new style which uses a monospace font.

Now the text contains many long words. I want Writer to split words at the end of the line. For example, take this line:

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb

Hopefully, you can see that all b’s are put on a new line. I want Writer to look like this website’s preformatted text:

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb

[ajlittoz]

There is no real satisfactory solution.

My workaround is to replace the spaces U+0020 SPACE by non-breaking spaces U+00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE. Since you are in monospace font, both characters have the same width and this does not change the general appearance of the output.

Your lines (paragraph) are the a single huge word and Writer will split at end of line.

Note: with my Linux keyboard handler, the no-break space is Ctrl+Shift+Space. This is handy to type it in Edit>Find & Replace.

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[zetta1000]

Thanks for the answer. I wish there was a better way to get preformatted text. However, replacing all spaces with non-breaking spaces improves the style quite a bit.

[keme]

To have all automatic line breaks always occur at the edge, you need to defeat the word wrap. The only way I see is to replace all word delimiting characters by non-breaking variants.

For space and hyphen, hold ctrl+shift to type the non-breaking character. If you need to fix large text sections, you can use find/replace. You can’t type the non-breaking character into the replace field on all systems, but you can copy from your document and paste into the field. (Make one manual replacement, and copy from that.)

I am not aware that replacements exist for characters other than space and hyphen. E.g. pipe, exclamation mark and percent (|!%) are characters which - to Writer - constitute a word break, and which occur frequently in various coding contexts. Someone else may know a way.