Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 42770
add option to prevent single-letter words at end of line (No way of regulating the "orphanned" and widowed letters in a line.)
Last modified: 2013-02-07 22:37:28 UTC
In many languages the formal way of presenting text (not many know about this - because of lack of such functionality in *other* word processors) is that there cannot be any "single letter" words at the end of a line (Polish is one of the examples). I think there should be an additional "paragraph" option that allows to automatically link single-letter words to the next word - kind of "hard space" - but not being hard... I know i can reformat everything afterwards "with hand". But this is really not a solution. I can write a macro in Basic for this, or Java. But why I have to be a programmer to do such simple task? (These were answers I received for this post in the times of my StarOffice6 Betatesting). So. Solution: Ideally - another option in paragraph settings that can make this formatting available. Regards.
Reassigned to requirements. A formatting option to prevent single letters in a whole line of text (at the end of a paragraph).
In fact what I ask for is an option to prevent Writer to display single letter at the end of line - in middle of the paragraph/sentence. Example: BAD FORMATTING: Alice lives in a Wonderland. GOOD FORMATTING: Alice lives in a Wonderland. In this example letter "a" should be moved to the next line. Exception: GOOD FORMATTING: Alice got a grade A. (single letter is at the end of sentence). I'm not sure this is a case of "good formatting" in English but it really is in many other languages. So the example is choosen to depict what this issue is really about. Imagine a sentence: (...) blah blah blah blah. A fox is a clever animal. It really should look like: (...) blah blah blah blah. A fox is a clever animal.
as a workaround, you can always insert a non-breaking space after the one-letter words. setting keywords
yes cloph, this workaround is what i've used, but: 1. you'd have to do the hardspace before each singleletter (no matter what position in text it takes) - you can never be sure how will the page be reformatted after some changes (fontsize, style, etc.) - very annoying while touchtyping. 2. it bakes autoformatting - it's normally applied after pressing space. If you press hard-space, special marks&chars will not be reformatted... Regards,
Actually, in MS Word this behavior is automatic (at least in Czech language version, where the same rules apply). If you write any text in MS Word and then open it in OO, you can see the automatically inserted nonbreakable spaces. I think in MS Word you can even define which short words should be attached to the next longer one using the nonbreakable space, and you can also turn on and off this option. So why shouldn't we have this behavior also in OpenOffice?
*** Issue 81210 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***