Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 79861
Unwanted empty paragraph if "New (text only)" autotext inserted
Last modified: 2017-05-20 10:45:36 UTC
There are two options when creating new autotext: (a) New (b) New (text only) When inserting autotext into a document, the results differ with respect to a final line break: (a) no final line break (b) final line break (end of paragraph break). I suggest to change the behaviour of (b), i.e. to suppress the final line break when reading the autotext into the document. Advantages: (1) same behaviour for (a) and (b) (2) especially for short type (b) autotexts "snippets" it is much more convenient to continue typing without interruption to delete the final line break (3) a series of type (b) autotexts can be inserted without deleting the unwanted line breaks in between (4) the present labels (a) and (b) for the creation of new autotexts, which do not reflect the above mentioned difference could remain as they are (otherwise the labels should be modified!) Backward compatibility: It is only a very little efford to get used to inserting a paragraph break by hand for somebody who is used to the present behaviour of (b). By changing just the reading of autotext type (b), there is no need to change anything inside existing autotext files, where both types of autotext are stored with <text:p> and </text:p> tags. Gisbert
Reassigned to SBA.
Reassigned
*** Issue 79861 has been confirmed by votes. ***
@OS: it seems that an AutoText saved as Text only will always end with an empty paragraph. This is not intended.
*** Issue 109876 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
@es: Thanks for updating and classifying as DEFECT.
Here some more thought after a little more investigation. As I've described in Issue 109876, I'm simply trying to use "text only" Autotext to simplify inserting special space characters (HAIR SPACE and THIN SPACE) into text. Since I want those spaces to take the formatting of the text I insert them so, I chose "New (text only)" to create the entries. Now this is what we already had. What happens is that a line break return is added to that entry, which I think is the defective behaviour here. This line break cannot be removed by editing the AutoText, it is re-inserted every time. I cannot think of a reason why this should be wanted. Needless to repeat it makes the function unusable for my purposes. This also means that only changing the reading of the AutoTexts ist not the way to go. It would have the advantage not to have to correct all AutoTexts having this unwanted line break manually, yes. But it shifts the defective behavior onto those cases where a terminating line break is actually wanted, for example when I would like to have an ellipsis character (or another glyph) at the end of a paragraph and I'd like to insert a succeeding line break as well. However, I seem to have found a work around for until the issue is resolved. Create a "normal" AutoText entry from whatever text you want. Do choose "New", not "New (text only)". The AutoText entry is created _with_ the formatting it had when it was created (paragraph style, character style, etc.) Now edit that entry, setting all styles (paragraph, character, lists, whatever) to "Default". The highlight all text, right click on it and choose "Default Formatting". The AutoText is now stripped of all formatting and should behave like unformatted text. Save and close all AutoText dialogs. When you now insert the AutoText, it correctly integrates with all formatting of the target text, and it doesn't have the unwanted line break. I've tested it and it seems to work like you would expect "text only" AutoTexts to behave. Hope this is of help for anyone.
It took almost 3 years to get this issue marked as a defect. It should be obvious to anyone that uses autotext, that inserting boilerplate text strings should not default to always having a newline silently appended. And, further, that you cannot even edit out the newline if you don't want it. This defect renders "text only" autotext practically useless, since it only speeds up document production in a case in which an entire paragraph is being inserted. The fact that it has been a known issue for so long, coupled with its negative impact on usability, should push this defect up toward the top of the list of bugs to be fixed.
*** Issue 123748 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
Reset the assignee to the default "issues@openoffice.apache.org".