https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=172899

--- Comment #2 from MartinPC <[email protected]> ---
(In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #1)
> (In reply to MartinPC from comment #0)
> > My suggested fix is that inactive soft hyphens not be displayed at all when
> > "Toggle Formatting Marks" (Ctrl-F10) is OFF...
> You can switch it off per Tools > Options > Writer > Formatting Aids > [ ]
> Soft Hyphens. 
> 
> > Soft/​conditional hyphens are NOT DISPLAYED AT ALL... I propose that soft
> > hyphens (and other non-printing characters?) be displayed in standard
> > non-printing Ticino blue in the Find-and-Replace dialog fields.
> Why would you need to see _soft_ hyphen (and other formatting marks) in the
> F&R dialog (ctrl+H)? And what exactly do you mean with "see"? I could
> understand if you talk about spelling but find? If you search for SN-AFU
> just search for SNAFU. And if you want to find only soft hyphen you may use
> the regular expression [\u00ad].
> 
> > Ticino blue
> Nice name, not even Pantone has a proper name for "2382 C" ;-). It's
> #268BD2, available for customization via Tools > Options > Appearance:
> Customization > Non-printable characters.

Thanks for following up!

Unfortunately, switching off soft hyphens in the Formatting Aids options menu
switches them OFF ALL OF THE TIME, and leaving them switched on switches them
ON ALL OF THE TIME. Other hidden, non-printing characters appear as blue
symbols when Toggle Formatting Marks (Ctrl-10 or the toolbar's pilcrow button)
is toggled ON, and they [dis]appear as they would in printed output when Toggle
Formatting Marks is toggled OFF. But the display of embedded, inactive soft
hyphens doesn't get toggled on or off with other "hidden," non-printed
characters. The setting you choose for soft hyphens in Tools > Options > Writer
> Formatting Aids > Soft Hyphens DOESN'T GET TOGGLED; the switch remains in
effect ALL OF THE TIME. Plus, when soft hyphens are inactive/​embedded/​hidden
they appear in the font's regular color, not in the special color for
non-printable characters. These are BUGS.

As for the usefulness of seeing soft hyphens in Find and Replace, I don't know
that adding a soft-hyphenated word to a spelling dictionary includes its
custom, non-standard, special hyphenation that derogates from the active
language's general hyphenation rules. From memory, I don't think it does. When
I come across a "long" word that LibreOffice isn't hyphenating correctly (or at
all), I manually hyphenate it with soft hyphens and replace all hyphenless
instances in the document with soft-hyphened ones using the Replace All
command. (When applicable, I sometimes go back and UNhyphenate instances in
special regions, like headers, footers, and appendixes.)

As for the usefulness of being able to see and find soft hyphens in Find and
Replace, suppose that I change my mind about how I custom-hyphenated a word. It
would be nice to be able to find all of the instances of the "bad" hyphenation
and replace them with a "good" version. Conceivably, there might be some
unhyphenated instances (e.g., in "special regions") that I wouldn't want to
hyphenate at all. It would be nice to be able to exclude the latter instances
from a Replace All command by finding only the instances that are
soft-hyphenated "wrong."

Finally, embedded soft hyphens aren't displayed in the Spellchecker dialog,
either. It would be helpful if they were!

PS: I think it was Brave Search's "Leo" AI that told me LibreOffice's default
color for displaying non-printing characters was called "Ticino" blue. (I'd
vaguely remembered that it was called "helium" blue, but whatever.) Back in the
day, before ca. spring 2017, I would have found the definitively correct answer
in a matter of *seconds* using what was then indisputably the world's best
search engine. Nowadays, I'm stuck relying on sometimes-hallucinating AI to
find unreliable, tentative answers in order to avoid having to put tens of
minutes or even hours into a non-AI Web search. (I'm pretty sure that "Leo"
*also* told me that LibreOffice's special color for displaying non-printable
characters could NOT be changed in Options, though many users were clamoring
for it…) I'm an old-timer, and while not *everything* was better in the good
old days, Web search *absolutely*, *definitely* WAS.

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