Hi, I was trying to figure out why the latest version of LibreOffice Writer refuses to break lines at syllable boundaries in Hangul, the Korean alphabet, and it brought me to this bug report.
The original bug report had it completely wrong. The expected behaviour for serious Korean typography ever since the introduction of word spacing has always been breaking at the syllable boundary (each Hangul "character" represents a syllable), not just at word boundaries. This can be confirmed very easily by looking at any Korean book or newspaper, or very simply by seeing how Korean text displays on the web on Korean websites (or in your favourite text editor). Contrary to what the original reporter of the "bug" says, Firefox and Chrome have it correct. In case you really need to see for yourself, please feel free to take a look at PDF versions of articles in the maganize 새국어생활 Sae Gugeo Saenghwal put out by the National Institute of Korean Language, the governing body of the Korean language in South Korea: http://www.korean.go.kr/nkview/nklife/2016_2.html For example, in the first article ( http://www.korean.go.kr/nkview/nklife/2016_2/26_0201.pdf), you see 엑사바이트 split at 엑/사바이트, 해결하는데 split at 해결하는/데, 사례집 split at 사례/집, and 데이터의 split at 데이/터의 at the end of the page. This is because Hangul graphemes are composed in syllabic units, so the syllable boundaries represent a natural enough break to wrap around lines—sort of where you would insert hyphens anyway if you were breaking lines in English. This practice means that even for flush left text, the right-hand side of a text in Hangul tends to be pretty even, as they would fall within the width of a syllable. If you forced wrapping only at word boundaries, however, the right-hand side would become very ragged. If you did full justification, the spaces on certain lines would be noticeably larger than on others. This goes against well-established norms of Korean typography. So the default setting for Hangul text should be to break at the syllable boundary, not just at word boundaries. You could certainly have breaking at word boundaries as an option, but LibreOffice Writer would be completely unusable for serious Korean text work if it didn't allow an option to break at any syllable boundary. I noticed the wrong behaviour after I upgraded to LibreOffice 6.1.1.2., and I'm tearing my hair out trying to figure out how to fix this problem. All I can do at this point seems to be to insert zero-width spaces manually in every line. By the way, because Korean typography uses spacing, no space should be inserted between Hangul and non-Hangul text, so that option should be off by default for Korean and preferably decoupled from Chinese or Japanese. But at least I am able to change the settings to make it correct, so it is not as critical of a fix. But the issue of wrapping Korean text correctly is critical to being able to use LibreOffice for Korean text. Please, I would request your urgent attention. Best regards, Brian Jongseong Park
