Ross Johnson wrote:
On the other hand, the Online help describes the Auto-replace dashes
option as "This option replaces one or two minus signs under certain
conditions with a long dash". This could definitely use some of Jallan's
description. A little experimenting shows that:
A-B is unchanged (hyphen)
A- B is unchanged
A-- B is unchanged
A - B and A -- B are changed (en-dash with space before and after)
A -B and A --B are changed (en-dash with no space after)
A--B (em-dash with no space before or after)
So for the en-dash, the space before is the key, and for the em-dash no
space before or after is the key.
Where you want A - B or A = -B to remain unchanged (math formulas etc)
you need to use the no-break hyphen (no-break minus in this case). As
there is A -- B or A --B, why can't the single hyphen be left unchanged
in every situation?
This doesn't answer your question, exactly, since it isn't about the
default behavior. But looking thru the help and experimenting a bit, I
think you could customize your version of OOo to do what you're asking
about here--that is, to allow the single hyphen to always remain
unchanged. (Yes, I'm a habitual em-dash user, which is why I've been
avidly following this thread.)
You can turn off the dash-correction behavior in the AutoCorrect Options
tab and add new options in the Replace tab for what you want to do: "--"
is replaced by the em dash and " --" is replaced by the en dash. You
could get fancy and define exactly how you want the spaces to be
replaced, but if it boils down to wanting the dual hyphens replaced only
with an em or en dash with no spaces, it's very easy to customize it
that way. More complicated spacing requirements (for example, each dash
with no spaces around it plus each dash with spaces on either side of
it) may require you to remember some arcane shortcut, such as using
another character you hardly ever use (pipes or the tilde, for example)
as part of the text to be replaced, but would still be doable.
Not that you necessarily want to go to the trouble of doing that, but
you could. And my sneaking suspicion is that such a workaround would
work for other examples of the AutoCorrect built-in functions being too
smart for one's particular uses, as well. For example, I think I've just
inspired myself to check for, and fix if necessary, the "apostrophe
problem". I keep "smart" quotes turned on in every word processor I've
used since they've been available, but only for double quotation marks;
if I turn it on for single quotation marks, then apostrophes wind up
being upside down, which I find unacceptable despite the proliferation
of such usage in so many modern documents and even publications. If OOo
is smart enough to figure out the difference between an opening single
quote and an apostrophe, then my hat is off to the programmers; if not,
I don't blame them since other word processors (*cough*Word*cough*)
can't do it either and I'd guess it's pretty tricky to implement. In
which case I will define replacement text, using an oddball character,
that will always be a right-side-up apostrophe and start learning to
type it when I want one. Then I can turn "smart" quotes back on for
single quotation marks and have those as nice-looking as my double ones.
Kira
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