There is no way to change the spacing between words, and i think it's a very important setting, given that the space between words that LO uses atm, is just very small. Reading something in LO is way more tiresome than reading in Calibre's Bookviewer for example, where the spacing is bigger which increases the readibility a lot. There is a sweet spot, but that's propably very subjective. Anyway, i wanted to request this overlooked feature and urge everybody to look into comparisons about short and long spacing between words. Here's is just one article that talks about that: https://creativepro.com/the-complete-guide-to-word-spacing/ Regards! jojo
Controlling interword spacing to optimize legibility should be possible, but would depend on how much dev effort it would need to implement/refactor. Otherwise isn't this out of scope for an office suite, trending deep into the realm of Desktop Publishing? And not clear the work it would require is justified. IIUC we work simply with spacing derived from font metrics, with some limited ability in GUI to adjust glyph kerning, or apply kashida, for intraword spacing Paragraph justification works against the margin settings to distribute word spacing, and revise hyphenation when needed. While "register true" is applied at the page margins to assure paragraph lines align page to page. Who knows, perhaps some HarfBuzz magic?
You can already scale the width of spaces manually. I think any thing beyond that, is out of scope for an office suite.
(In reply to Regina Henschel from comment #2) > You can already scale the width of spaces manually. I think any thing beyond > that, is out of scope for an office suite. @Regina, you've stumped me. Nothing obvious in GUI, nor in Expert Configuration stanzas. So, where is the user control to "scale the width of spaces"?
@V Stuart Foote: You can mark the space and then use Format > Character. Then use tab "Position". It has the option "Rotation/Scaling" and there "scale width". I use a reduced width on a non-breaking space between number and unit to reduce the distance between number and unit.
(In reply to Regina Henschel from comment #4). @Regina a bit hackish, but you are right we can use Find & Replace to find all Spaces--then from the Character dialog scale the selection--just the spaces. But looking at Flat ODT result, see a T1 defined with a scale of 300%, and then every word in the paragraph is broken by a text span holding the space with its scaling. Also, interesting in that when showing NPC the blue dot for the spaces are also scaled/stretched, weird. Just not sure that would be functional for folks in general. Every space baloons into a 46 character <text:span>, and breaks up the paragraph. Thanks though! -- Stuart
s/just the spaces./just the spaces at 300%.
There exists a CSS property "word-spacing". https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/pr_text_word-spacing.asp or https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/word-spacing. It exists in XSL-fo too, but not in ODF. https://www.w3.org/TR/xsl/#word-spacing
Let's close it as WF based on comment 2 (if you replace one space by two per find/replace it has the same effect as scaling to 200%). Plus, readability comes with the font and we shouldn't compensate for a "creative" kerning.
This is not only a CSS/XSL feature, but default in DTP software to increase readability. For example, the default minimum, desired and maximum word spacing (e.g. 80%, 100%, 133%) of DTP software can limit hyphenation and optimize text layout simultaneously, making more readable text.
László Németh committed a patch related to this issue. It has been pushed to "master": https://git.libreoffice.org/core/commit/5a48070f5904c51dc9e7bbad4213d802fd4bc89b tdf#126154 sw offapi xmloff cui: add min/max word spacing It will be available in 25.8.0. The patch should be included in the daily builds available at https://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/daily/ in the next 24-48 hours. More information about daily builds can be found at: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Testing_Daily_Builds Affected users are encouraged to test the fix and report feedback.
Created attachment 200514 [details] tdf126154.fodt: test document Section 1 (only desired word spacing: 100%): 5 hyphenated lines Section 2 (minimum word spacing: 80%, desired: 100%): 1 hyphenated line Section 3 (monimum: 80%, desired: 100%, maximum: 133%): no hyphenated line
Created attachment 200515 [details] tdf126154.pdf: PDF export of the test document
Created attachment 200516 [details] screenshot: Word spacing options in Paragraph settings dialog window -> Alignment -> Justification
Created attachment 200704 [details] tdf126154_minimum_shrinking.fodt: unit test document for fixing minimum word spacing Paragraph 2 of Section 2 and 3 was broken not after the hyphenated word "bulum", but after the following 1-letter word "c" (it was greedy shrinking, i.e. choosing the furthest, not the nearest space to the desired word spacing).
László Németh committed a patch related to this issue. It has been pushed to "master": https://git.libreoffice.org/core/commit/3dd2d7f449f13bec0f0a5c6e0c33a143409c3723 tdf#126154 sw word spacing: fix greedy space shrinking It will be available in 25.8.0. The patch should be included in the daily builds available at https://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/daily/ in the next 24-48 hours. More information about daily builds can be found at: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Testing_Daily_Builds Affected users are encouraged to test the fix and report feedback.
Thanks László for implementing this feature. Is this something related to tdf#155707? tdf#155707 - Implement justified/justify low/medium/high paragraph alignments https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=155707
László Németh committed a patch related to this issue. It has been pushed to "master": https://git.libreoffice.org/core/commit/01d1037262070ae4ab37868bb47f6ac258433618 tdf#126154 tdf#149420 tdf#165984 sw: fix hyphenation zones with portions It will be available in 25.8.0. The patch should be included in the daily builds available at https://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/daily/ in the next 24-48 hours. More information about daily builds can be found at: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Testing_Daily_Builds Affected users are encouraged to test the fix and report feedback.
(In reply to Hossein from comment #16) > Thanks László for implementing this feature. > > Is this something related to tdf#155707? > > tdf#155707 - Implement justified/justify low/medium/high paragraph > alignments > https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=155707 Hossein: thanks for your kind feedback! It seems, enabling bigger word spacing for these DOCX settings can fix Kashida visualization, too, so I did that, fixing also its DOCX round-trip. I will comment it in Bug 155707.
Created attachment 200770 [details] tdf126154_portion.fodt: unit test document with text portion A test document for the fixed minimum word spacing, paragraph end zone and hyphenation zone. No hyphenation is in all text lines at underlined words.
László Németh committed a patch related to this issue. It has been pushed to "master": https://git.libreoffice.org/core/commit/41d3574263d90f1872ff0bad74618761e84d0f61 tdf#126154 sw word spacing: fix greedy shrinking regression It will be available in 25.8.0. The patch should be included in the daily builds available at https://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/daily/ in the next 24-48 hours. More information about daily builds can be found at: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Testing_Daily_Builds Affected users are encouraged to test the fix and report feedback.