Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 63234
Intelligent soft hyphen handling as in WORD required
Last modified: 2014-04-03 13:08:08 UTC
When a word is copied from Writer into the Windows clipboard, any soft hyphens in the word are copied along with it. This is undesirable in most cases. For example, I often copy words in order to paste them into the web form of an online dictionary. Then I must first remove all the soft hyphens manually (which appear as blanks in my dictionary http://dict.leo.org) before I can submit the word. When I paste the word into Windows Notepad instead, the soft hyphens are converted to dashes, which is equally undesirable. By default, soft hyphens should be removed before storing the text in the clipboard (that's the way MS Word does it, too).
This is related to issue 15616 (soft hyphens are not ignored by Search and Replace). Both issues should probably be fixed together.
I checked it for the RTF interface (which is used when copying text to MS Word or Wordpad. This all works as desired. MRU->ES: please chack tha HTML and Plaintext (for Notepad) interface for this.
When checking, note that the soft hyphens don't become visible when pasting into a web form, but they are included nevertheless when the form is submitted. In Google, you will notice that the Search results refer to the hyphenated word (often showing dashes instead). On http://dict.leo.org, the hyphens break the word up into several parts. When pasting into Word or other programs that directly support soft hyphens, it would of course be OK to leave them in. However, as far as I understand how the clipboard works, I think it's necessary to remove the hyphens already in the moment the user copies a word, because OOo cannot know what program the user is going to paste the text into, right?
When copying a soft hyphen, this hyphen *must* be present in the clipboard for applications which can deal with it (ex: Word). In ASCII format, it is replaced with a dash and that's consistent.
closed
Sorry, but I disagree. It should be handled exactly like MS Word does it. If you copy a word with a soft hyphen from a Word document (I tested it with Word 2000) and paste it into an ASCII Text or an HTML form, the hyphen is removed (which is a lot more convenient than having to remove it manually - and a dash or blank is of no use in that case). However, if you paste the very same word back into a Word or OOo document, the soft hyphen is left in (which makes sense as you pointed out). So obviously it *is* possible to differentiate between target applications in the clipboard, and OOo should do that, too.
I did some further tests with result as following. For those tests I copied a Word containing a soft hypen and additionally a word in front an after the soft hyphened word ("letztes Wildtier-reservat Afrikas) to the clipoard using menu "Edit - Copy". Afterwards I pasted the clipboard to several applications 1. Seamonkey HTML composer No dash (or anything else) visible, no soft hyphen visible , but it's still there. 2. WIN XP Editor analogous to 'WIN XP Editor' 3. Google Search pane (Browser: Seamonkey 1.0.6) No dash (or anything else) visible, but the soft hyphen still is in the word. Google searches for "letztes Wildtier-reservat Afrikas" (390 hits), not for "letztes Wildtier-reservat Afrikas" (45 hits) (It's just the same as with IE7) 4. LEO Dict (Broswer: Seamonkey 1.0.6) analogous to Google. 5. To an OOo form Field The soft hyphen is shown as a dash, whht looks ugly, but it's no problem The function remains, When the text is copied / pasted back to OOo, the soft hyphen still is at it's place All this is not unexpected, the soft hyphen must be in the clipboard contents, because the information is required for several applicateions (for example, if you paste to another OOo WRITER document). Then I did all the same tests with the same string from a WORD 2000. Results 1. Seamonkey HTML composer As OOo 2. WIN XP Editor Differs from OOo's behaviour , the soft hyphen has been deleted and does not reappear, when I copy/paste the editor contents to OOo 3. Google Search pane (Browser: Seamonkey 1.0.6) Differs from OOo's behaviour , the soft hyphen has been deleted and does not reappear, when I copy/paste the editor contents to OOo 4. LEO Dict analogous to Google. 5. To an OOo form Field Differs from OOo's behaviour , the soft hyphen has been deleted and does not reappear, when I copy/paste the editor contents to OOo My suspect is that that hasn't to do with OOo, but with WIN clipboard handling. It seems that WIN clipboard handling (or may be WORD special clipboard handling) deletes soft hyphens before paste if they would be without sense at the new string place. May be it would be an useful Enhancement to have a similar intelligent handling like we see it for WORD soft hyphens.
Is anybody working on this issue? It is still present in OOo 2.1 final. This is a really serious bug, at least for me, because it interferes with my daily work all the time. I'm translating a book written in OOo, and almost each word I copy from the book into my online dictionary (http://dict.leo.org) contains soft hyphens, which means that in almost each and every word I look up, I have to delete the soft hyphens (converted into blanks by LEO) manually before getting a useful translation. Really tedious. I'm surprised that I seem to be the only one who has voted for this issue so far.
The issue is still present in version 2.2. I get the impression that nothing is being done about this bug at all, which really surprises and frustrates me. What can I do to give this bug appropriate priority (without offending the developers)? I don't want to change the status fields without asking ...
To grep the issues easier via "requirements" I put the issues currently lying on my owner to the owner "requirements".
Paste to Notepad has dash instead optional hyphen. Paste to dictionary in description is clean. AOO410m15(Build:9761) - Rev. 1583666 2014-04-01 13:53:14 (Di, 01 Apr 2014) Win 7