Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 21131
Enable consistent handling of dashes in autocorrect
Last modified: 2004-01-15 16:47:15 UTC
Hi, The help states "Ctrl+Shift+minus sign (-) Non-breaking dash (is not used for hyphenation) It pruduces only a minus sign and not a dash. Steps to reproduce. Create or open a document in Writer. Type Ctrl+Shift+minus sign. You still get a minus sign. I have noticed this in other versions too. [I am still bummed about that decision to compleatly stall the Mac port. It stands to reason, that there must be /something/ that can be done to port it while waiting for the new libraries. If anyone was actually working on any part of the program, perhaps more people would join in. The two small questions that immediatly pop into my mind are "Is there some bad mojo between Apple and Sun, and how much does Sun have on OpenOffice. Of course there are other explanations why no one is working on a project that is so desperatly needed for the Mac." Thanks to everyone who make OpenOffice possible, Brenda
Hi, Brenda: I'm afraid I don't understand your issue -- the non-breaking dash works as expected to prevent part of a word that has a dash in it from being moved to the next line. Could you provide more information as to what you are expecting it to do? Your comments regarding the Mac port would be more appropriate for mailing list -- IssueZilla is for dealing with bugs and enhancement requests. Thanks, Tam
Brenda, I have an idea what you mean: Is it that, for you, a "minus sign" is a very short horizontal line while a "dash" is a longer horizontal line? To have the dash for parentheses (i.e. a long dash, also known as em-dash) just type a word, then insert a space, then "-" (i.e. short dash from keyboard), then a space again, then another word, then space, and the short dash turns automatically into the long dash for parentheses. You can also choose dashes of three different lengths from > Insert > Special character ... As Tamblyne said, Ctrl+Shift+minus behaves as expected. So the Help text isn´t faulty.
There should be a key combination to produce dash. I often end up typing a--b to produce this character character, and then I backspace from there. A menu drill-down to get character is too long. Cutting and pasting it from elsewhere in the document is faster than picking one from the character chart, and it would be easy to grab the wrong sized dash from the chart. Besides my everyday writing chores, I have written a book that's 98,000 words exclusively in OpenOffice. I am surprised that there is no key combination to make such a common character so often used in American-English.
This Issue is taking a turn towards an enhancement request concerning the treatment of dashes of different kinds. I will modify the summary accordingly and try to sum up the present state of discussion, together with an enhancement request: From brendaem 2003-10-24 10:43 PDT: "There should be keyboard shortcuts to produce dashes". Well, first OOo does produce dashes with autocorrect. This can be enhanced, though, as Brenda is right to point out. I will come back to that later. For the time being it´s possible to * either record the "menue drill down process" for both the en- and the em-dash dash into a macro and assign this macro to a key shortcut, or * define your own autocorrect items via > Tools > Autocorrect > Replace. I have tried with good success to have " -- " being replaced by the en-dash and " --- " being replaced by the em-dash (each preceded and followed by a space). For this to work properly, you need to turn off > Tools > Autocorrect > Options > Replace dashes first. As to the enhancement request: The "Replace dashes" option in Autocorrect behaves inconsistently: * For having an en-dash, you need to type "a -- b " (note the spaces). The en-dash is then preceeded and followed by a space. * For having an em-dash, you need to type "a--b " (note space). The em-dash is not preceeded nor followed by a space. Following typographic rules (at least which I could get hold of) it is possible to have both dashes either with spaces or without. My suggestion is to allow both for the en- and em-dash, incorporated into autocorrect. When that´s been implemented, there won´t be need for key shortcuts for dashes, I think.
this is pretty close to a duplicate of an issue I filed some years ago (!) about autocorrect and dashes -- #5018. That is down as an enhancement, but was at one stage targetted for OOo 2.0. If you just want to assign a key combination to these dashes, then there are macros that will do this quite easily.
Issue 5018 lists a number of items connected with autocorrect, among which the Replace Dash is only one. And in 5018 it doesn´t mention the inconsistency between handling the different dash types, while its main target was to modify the replace procedure of one dash type only, without touching the inconsistency problem. So this one has a broader target. Anyway, thanks for pointing out Issue 5018. So hopefully this issue´s target will get set to OOO 2.0 as well :)
reassigend to bh
I've just been pointed to Issue 13531 which deals very much with the handling of dashes in OOo. Part of that issue is the handling of dashes in autocorrect, so this can be closed as a duplicate of Issue 13531. *** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 13531 ***
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