Bug 140442

Summary: Make non-breaking hyphen the default hyphen character in LibreOffice Writer
Product: LibreOffice Reporter: febrezo <felixbrezo>
Component: WriterAssignee: Not Assigned <libreoffice-bugs>
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX    
Severity: enhancement CC: dgp-mail, libreoffice-ux-advise, nemeth, vsfoote
Priority: medium Keywords: needsUXEval
Version: Inherited From OOo   
Hardware: All   
OS: All   
Whiteboard:
Crash report or crash signature: Regression By:
Bug Depends on:    
Bug Blocks: 120883    

Description febrezo 2021-02-16 11:56:27 UTC 
Description:
Knowing that it is probably a non-standard feature that may lead to some discussion, in my experience almost most of the time that I manually add in a text processor a hyphen is expected to work as a non-breaking hyphen. I wonder if, given the particularities of this symbol, this could be an option to consider by default instead of using, for example, Ctrl + Shift  + U + 2011 in GNU/Linux systems to insert it. 

I feel that maybe newcomers would feel comfortable with this forgetting about why manually split words are put in different lines which may be not an easy‑to‑understand behaviour to describe for many people. Admitting that this may need an additional feature to activate or deactivate the configuration in the application options, I think that this may be helpful.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Write a random sentence with a long word at the end that forces the word to go to the next line
2. Add to the last word a standard hyphen


Actual Results:
The behaviour can be check taking into account that half of the word is in the line above and the other below which, in fact, is a spelling mistake recognised as such in languages such as Spanish.

Expected Results:
Using by default a non-breaking hyphen and letting Ctrl + Shift + - for standard hyphens could help to make it transparent for newcomers considering that many times the non-breaking hyphen is expected to work as a linker.


Reproducible: Always


User Profile Reset: No



Additional Info:
References about non-breaking characters seemed not to be linked to this visual issue.
Comment 1 Dieter 2021-03-03 08:24:22 UTC 
cc: Design-Team for decision

Personally I don't have a stron opinion about it.
Comment 2 V Stuart Foote 2021-03-03 15:54:40 UTC 
We already provide the U+2011 Unicode NON-BREAKING HYPHEN via shortcut

<Ctrl><Shift>-

or from main menu Insert -> Formatting Mark menu items.

We also have the autocorrect options to Replace Dash, where input of two keyboard hyphens will be converted to an U+2014 EM DASH (or into U+2013 EN DASH for numbers)[1].

An autocorrect replacement of keyboard hyphen (U+002D) with non-breaking  (U+2011) would cause more grief than it would be worth.

IMHO a change to handling keyboard hyphen is not helpful and a => WF

=-ref-=
[1] https://help.libreoffice.org/7.2/en-US/text/shared/01/06040100.html?&DbPAR=WRITER&System=WIN
Comment 3 Heiko Tietze 2021-03-03 16:55:48 UTC 
(In reply to febrezo from comment #0)
> ...almost most of the time that I manually add in  a text processor a hyphen
> is expected to work as a non-breaking hyphen....

If true the request makes sense. Many users might be confused by this switch and we could do it optionally.
Comment 4 Dieter 2021-03-03 17:05:37 UTC 
(In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #3)
> If true the request makes sense.

I think it is true for people, who use automatically hyphenation.
Comment 5 Roman Kuznetsov 2021-03-03 17:19:20 UTC 
>Make non-breaking hyphen the default hyphen character in LibreOffice Writer

-100
Comment 6 Heiko Tietze 2021-03-11 14:27:50 UTC 
Had this topic on the meeting agenda but no further input than what we got so far. And it is more rejection than acceptance. 

The positive aspect of keeping it is that users are familiar with this behavior.