[Issue] View Non-Printing Characters not quite right

[Mohawk]

Oo.o 3.3.0 on Win7/64

Hi There,

I've joined the forum specifically to provide this feedback (and possibly more having used Word 2003 professionally as a technical author...). I find it hard to believe nobody else has noticed, or maybe it's a deliberate design decision, but a search threw up nothing.

Do you realise View Non-Printing Characters doesn't reveal them all? All the space characters between words are shown EXCEPT where at the end of an auto-wrapped line. Why is that? Is it intentional or an oversight? If it is intentional, please can I have an option to turn them on?

Thanks.

[Hagar Delest]

Hi and welcome to the forum!

Can you upload a screenshot showing that precisely (see How to attach a document here)?

[JohnV]

Hager,

Just do dtF3 and you will see that none of the right side spaces are shown . OOo3.3 under Windows.

[Hagar Delest]

OK, I see. Sorry to have been a bit lazy...

Haven't seen any report about that yet on the issue tracker.
-> [Tutorial] Reporting bugs or suggestions.

[Mohawk]

So you think it's a real problem then, not just my imagination or error in expectation or something that's already been fixed? Do you still need me to post an example (any text document viewed in Writer with non-printing characters revealed should show it)?

If you agree, forgive me for being lazy this time because of other pressures... would somebody be so kind as to submit it as a bug report?

[acknak]

It's by design: spaces around an automatic line-break are special.

As you noticed, they aren't displayed with the other spaces, and if you type more than one at the break point, the characters are recorded in the document but the cursor doesn't move--which naturally surprises and annoys almost everyone.

If you later change the margins or do anything else that causes the line to break at a different place, the spaces magically re-appear!

I really have no idea what they were thinking when they designed it this way, but it is definitely done on purpose.

But... it doesn't really matter: there's no purpose for runs of more than one space. If you ever find that you want to type more than one space, you're almost certainly doing something wrong--there's some other, easier, better way to get what you want.

[franx]

That's probably
→ Bug 20878 - Q-PCD Show spaces at end of a wrapped line in Writer [OOo]

See also
→ Bug 33167 - Please show spaces at the end of the line [LibO]

[Mohawk]

Thanks for drawing my attention to the existing bug reports.

I really don't agree. One job I have to do is sanitise other people's typing. That means making sure there is only one space charater between words and two spaces after full stops. I don't want to do that and then have to do it again because the line wrap has changed and spacing errors that were hidden at the margin are now in the middle of a line.

I realise I could do a search for double spaces and make them all single, then search for single spaces following a full stop and make them all double, but that is not the point. There is no reason I can see that they could not be made visible (inside the margin if necessary, as are paragraph and manual line break symbols), or that there would be anything lost if they were visible. The fact that other people have made the same bug report is evidence that they expect Writer to do it.

Does it not seem fundamentally odd that "reveal non-printing characters" doesn't reveal all of them?

[RoryOF]

The Search and replaces you have suggested are actually the quickest way to do this. One has to decide if one is going to use the tools as they stand, or just do nothing until they are redesigned to one's selected criteria.

[Mohawk]

Obviously I have to use the tools as they stand, I'm just putting forward the request that "show non-printing characters" does exactly that.

Having re-read the bug reports and the previous comments in this post I see they are on a slightly different tack. I accept that auto-line wrap defers the break until the end of a run of spaces... I just want to see them when revealed!

Despite the assertions to the contrary I stand by my original point. When revealed, please let's have a dot for every space in the text.

[franx]

→ Bug 33167 - Please show spaces at the end of the line
has been fixed for LibreOffice 3.5 (works only with left align).

Sample LibO-dev 3.5.0

[Mohawk]

Well, that's one point for LibreOffice then, but not game set and match if it only works for left-aligned paragraphs! It should work for any paragraph alignment, as it does in MSWord.

I find it hard to believe it is that difficult, or that other users used to corporate-quality document preparation haven't noticed (maybe they just use Word), or what daft design decision it was to say: "tell you what, when 'reveal non-printing characters' is enabled, let's only show some of them - the ones that lead into the margin obviously don't matter to anybody."

[floris v]

Slightly off-topic:
While a bug is certainly a bug, I disagree that a good implementation of Show non-printing characters is the way to get rid of two or more spaces in a row if they occur a lot in a document. It's much more efficient to get rid of any double spaces by a replace act than by hunting them down one by one.
I still remember the good old days of debates about the efficiency of macros in WordPerfect to get rid of multiple spaces, and the killer-macro replaced eight spaces in a row with one space, next four spaces, then two spaces, or maybe it started with sixteen. That macro could kill series of some 40 spaces in a row and it would be routinely used to tidy up badly formatted documents.

[Mohawk]

sigh.

Does it matter why I want it to work correctly? It doesn't do what it should - and what MSWord does perfectly well. As it happens I have hidden characters on habitually. Global edits are not perfect in any case - what happens if a "." character is being used in a technical context and is not a full stop? Why do I get the impression I'm the only ex-professional corporate technical author providing feedback??

Found some more problems too: how about widow/orphan/keep with next etc only working across page boundaries and not column boundaries? How about the format painter copying some formats and corrupting others?

[Mohawk]

Is there any progress on this in Apache? I tried LibreOffice but it made a cock-up of my documents in other more serious ways.

To reiterate, regardless of work-flow or what methods are most efficient (global search&replace won't work if there are places where you need a double space), "Show Non-Printing Characters" should do exactly that, or relabel it "Show Non-Printing Characters Unless It's Inconvenient".

[acknak]

If you want to check the progress, you have to look at the bug report(s) linked above.

Oops, sorry, here's the updated link: Issue 20878: Q-PCD Show spaces at end of a wrapped line in Writer

And ... the status is now: RESOLVED FIXED; the target release is AOO 4.0. When that might be, I have not seen any predictions.

Here's what it looks like in a recent nightly build:

Edit: PS:

You'd have to hold a gun to my head, or maybe get a ruling from the pope of written English, before I would consider more than one space anything other than a bug. When cleaning up documents, I always replace any runs of spaces with exactly one space. If you need extra space, use a tab or a wide space character.

[Mohawk]

That looks hopeful, thank you.

We'll have to agree to differ on the use of spaces (I partially agree, but there are exceptions) - but that is immaterial to the principle of Show Non-Printing Characters.

[RGB]

the target release is AOO 4.0. When that might be, I have not seen any predictions.

Probably, end of June

[acknak]

Wow! That would be fantastic. Thanks a lot for the link.