Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 30114
User hyphens (CTRL-minus) not working
Last modified: 2013-02-07 22:40:09 UTC
Entering a user hyphen via CTRL-minus in a text box is not possible. When a text with soft hypens is copied from a text document, the soft hyphen is replaced by a dash.
CGU: textengine is for me.
Duplicated on Win XP Pro 2002 SP1, OOo 1.1.2 Duplicated on Win XP Pro 2002 SP1, OOo 2.0_680 I dont expect this will be fixed if text boxes are simply not designed to hold a soft hyphen, as they would not hold other formatted text. a soft hyphen doesn't seem to be like any other character. Sounds like something that will be marked invalid. I'm confirming it though, to let someone more important decide.
Just to be sure, it is called 'custom hyphens' in the help. As automatic hyphenation (and a lot of other formatting) is supported in text boxes, why not custom hyphens? Automatic hyphenation is very difficult and buggy in German; why not give full control first, i.e. custom hyphens, and then provide automatic hyphenation as an add-on? In particular, word breaks are made at minus signs in words. So to control line breaks, I currently have to insert minus signs, and scan the text for these whenever I change the size of the box. It's boring. (well, many MS-Word users do so ...).
I think this is nit a bug but an enhancement. Please have a look.
'Soft hyphen' is more widely used than 'custom hyphen'. Some programs use more exotic names as 'Discretionary hyphen' (Macromedia Freehand) or 'hyphenation hint' (rare). I think 'soft hyphen' is the most unambiguous and should be preferred over 'custom hyphen' or any other alternative. I agree with cgu - this is an enhancement, but quite important one. <quote from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_hyphen> When flowing text, it is sometimes preferable to break a word in half so that it continues on another line rather than moving the entire word to the next line. However, doing so requires some knowledge of the conventions of language, making the writing of a computer programs capable of doing so automatically and accurately difficult. To avoid this problem, Unicode encodes a soft hyphen character, U+00AD: when flowing text, a system may consider the soft hyphen to be a point at which a word may be broken, and display a hyphen at the end of the broken line; otherwise, the hyphen is not displayed. In HTML, the soft hyphen is encoded as the character entity “­”. </quote>
To grep the issues easier via "requirements" I put the issues currently lying on my owner to the owner "requirements".