thomas steel wrote:
Dear Jim: Thanks, but I've done exectly what you said & got nowhere. I
have 'Replace dashes' ticked & I have duly entered the "-" and "--", but
I still just get a hyphen. Any idea why?
No idea at all. This method of creating a dash has been in
OpenOffice.org as long as I’ve been using it, since 1.1 in fact and
similar techniques are part of Microsoft Word and Word Perfect. I recall
them occurring in other Word Processors also.
If you type a word, two normal hyphens, and then another word following,
the two hyphens, after about a tenth of a second the hyphens change into
an em-dash, that is from “was made--about yesterday” becomes “was
made–about yesterday”. If you leave spaces around the hyphens you get
“was made -- about yesterday” becoming was made — about yesterday” with
an en-dash instead.
The full specification of this hyphen behavior can be found in Help
under “AutoCorrect function”, subentry “options”. Note this doesn’t work
when typing hyphens between symbols such as ¦ and @. You must use
letters or digits, though this includes letters and digits outside of
the ASCII range.
Just be sure the entry is checked in at least the “M” column under Tools
-> Autocorrect... -> Options. Check that the other options also work (or
inexplicably don’t work also). I don’t know of any way of turning off or
on any of these items other than removing the check mark in this single
window. So there isn’t, so far as I know, any secret override.
You might try rebooting of course.
You can at any rate find the en-dash in most modern fonts in the “Insert
special character window”. It is the Unicode character U+2013 near the
beginning of the “General Punctuation” section, right before the em-dash
and quotation-dash along with quotation marks and other non-ASCII
punctuation.
Dashes can also be achieved on most machines through some sort of
standard method of getting special characters. On Windows, with Num-Lock
on, you press the left-Alt key and keep it pressed while typing 0150 on
the numeric keypad. The code 0151 produces the em-dash instead. This
works with almost any program. Other operating systems have other
standard methods.
Or you can a keyboard editor. Minimal and very useful keyboard editors
are available at no cost for most operating systems.
But you really shouldn’t need this when OpenOffice provides a reasonable
way of doing getting an en-dash.
Jim Allan
Replace Dashes
Replaces one or two hyphens with a long dash (see the following table).
Text will be replaced after you type a trailing white space (space, tab,
or return). In the following table, the A and B represent text
consisting of letters A to z or digits 0 to 9.
Text that you type:
Result that you get:
A - B (A, space, minus, space, B)
A – B (A, space, en-dash, space, B)
A -- B (A, space, minus, minus, space, B)
A – B (A, space, en-dash, space, B)
A--B (A, minus, minus, B)
A—B (A, em-dash, B)
(see note below the table)
A-B (A, minus, B)
A-B (unchanged)
A -B (A, space, minus, B)
A -B (unchanged)
A --B (A, space, minus, minus, B)
A –B (A, space, en-dash, B)
If the text has the Hungarian or Finnish language attribute, then two
hyphens in the sequence A--B are replaced by an en-dash instead of an
em-dash.
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