Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 122359
Non-breaking spaces shown when nonprinting characters is off
Last modified: 2017-05-20 10:35:17 UTC
When "Non-printing characters" is not selected, non breaking spaces should not show up as a gray box. They should only show up when the non-printing characters are selected to be visible.
In menu 'Tools -> Options - OpenOffice Writer/OpenOffice -> Formatting Aids - Display of' you can uncheck visibility for Non-breaking spaces. So INVALID @Justin Please feel free to reopen the Bug if I misunderstood intention of your report.
"Non printing characters" should not be visible when the non-printing characters is toggled off. The selection in the preferences is regarding whether a non-printing character will show up when non-printing characters item on the toolbar is toggled ON. Please look at how the other symbols, like paragraph breaks behave.
That dialog indeed is a little inconsistent and worrying, because the list contains nonprinting characters, fields and worked in field shadings for a particular class of special characters. That should be straightened up. But I don't think that we have a bug. @Justin: It would help much if you could add some reasoning (please cite Help, norms, ...) why you expect that shading of Nonbreaking Space, Custom Hyphen should be switched off with nonprinting characters under particular circumstances Please also see "Bug 122369 - Sort list items in menu 'Tools - Options - Writer - Formatting Aids - Display of'" "Bug 122371 - Incorrect Help: 'Tools - Options - Writer - Formatting Aids - Display of'"
The reasoning is that if we have shading shown when non printing characters is off, you would expect the shading to print. Also it is cleaner when writing a document to be able to see WYSIWYG until you toggle Non-printing characters to show. Finally, This is the behavior of MS Word. I feel they are doing it correctly in this case.
Created attachment 80719 [details] Attachment showing the issue in OO vs Word The attachment shows what I feel is an error in implementation (ie bug) and an approach MS Word takes that I feel is cleaner and gets out of the writer's way.
It seems that the visibility of all formatting marks that you can insert via "Insert" - "Formatting Mark": Non-breaking space Non-breaking hyphen Optional hyphen is controlled by "View" - "Field Shadings". And in fact, field shading is on despite of "View" - "Nonprinting Characters" being off. This request can be resumed as: Formatting Mark's shading should depend on "View" - "Nonprinting Characters"
> you would expect the shading to print Definitively not. Or does anyone expect that Paragraph ends will be printed because they are visible on screen? For me the current behavior is plausible, a change to the WORD way would decrease usability for me (but of course that's my personal point of viewing). There are some good reasons for separation of <control+f8>, <control+f9>, <control+f10>. Please consider that <control+f8> also affects lots of fields. In my working world Field shading visibility is something completely different from NopC visibility, and I doubt that the request will get much (any?) approval.
Tools - Options... - OpenOffice Writer - Formatting Aids - Display of Non-breaking spaces works. AOO410m14(Build:9760) - Rev. 1582709 2014-03-30_04:11:07 - Rev. 1583103 Debian