Description: The changes to the Insert special characters function adds some minor advantages, but, at least for my purposes created a much greater disadvantage in 2 ways. 1) I used to be able to repeat the most recently used character by pressing alt-i, p, [enter] (for some reason, in later v. 5 releases someone thought it would be good to add an extra [enter] also). Now I have to use the mouse or hit alt-i, p, [enter], select the character with the mouse again, then hit [enter] again. 2) I sometimes have to introduce Greek words. Previous to v. 6 I could do the whole word or phrase before leaving the insert special character dialog. Now I can only do one letter at a time. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Press alt-i or click on insert menu 2. Press p or click on Special Character... 3. Select the desired character. 4. Hit [enter] or click on "Insert" 5. The dialog closes and the single letter is inserted in the text Actual Results: Works as intended, but that's the problem Expected Results: It should be possible to insert several letters or even a phrase without the dialog having to close. The early 5 versions were much easier to work with. Reproducible: Always User Profile Reset: No Additional Info: Version: 6.0.3.2 (x64) Build ID: 8f48d515416608e3a835360314dac7e47fd0b821 CPU threads: 8; OS: Windows 10.0; UI render: default; Locale: en-US (en_US); Calc: group User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/65.0.3325.181 Safari/537.36 OPR/52.0.2871.64
You can double click on a letter to directly insert it into the document. That said, we should maybe modify the enter behavior to only insert the character, not close the dialog.
That would go a long ways to making it more useable. It would be necessary, however, to be able to see the letter inserted either in the text or the dialog, preferably in the dialog (so it's not necessary to move the dialog with the mouse to see it in the text). That's how it works in v. 5.
Decision was made intentionally. Special workflows like yours should be realized in a different view, imho. But anyway, the request has been made in bug 115477. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 115477 ***
Yes, it was clear that it was a deliberate change. It seems to me, non-programmer that I am, that the changes could have been added without removing the functionality of the field where several characters could be chosen in sequence before inserting in the document. Problem is, everyone has a different workflow, right?
(In reply to Jon from comment #4) > Problem is, everyone > has a different workflow, right? And we thought that this dialog is not primarily used to compose words as your OS/DE allows several ways for that. No question that _special cases_ are not covered anymore. Btw, we usually blog about planned changes, see https://design.blog.documentfoundation.org/2015/03/26/libreoffice-design-session-special-character/ (unfortunately the comments are gone).