How to Turn On & Off Hyphenation In LibreOffice Writer

This tutorial explains how to add or remove hyphenation in a LibreOffice word document and guides you through the available options you can adjust.

Quick Intro: What Is Hyphenation?

Hyphenation is a feature that can be found in many word processing applications, including Microsoft Words, and LibreOffice Writer. It helps making documents look better by splitting lengthy words automatically at the end of lines in a paragraph.

This improves the overall page layout and readability of your document by avoiding awkward gaps of white space at the end of some lines. Instead of placing a long word on a new line, hyphenation allows you to split it into two words. This can help visually balancing the text on each line and make your document look more professional.

Hyphenation in LibreOffice Writer

In LibreOffice Writer, hyphenation is treated as a property of a paragraph. This means that you can easily set the hyphenation options for a paragraph by using the paragraph’s style property dialog. To access this dialog, right-click within the paragraph and select Paragraph > Edit style.

From there, you can enable or disable hyphenation and customize the available options to suit your needs. By using the paragraph’s style property dialog, you can easily control the hyphenation settings for multiple paragraphs at once.

To turn off hyphenation in a paragraph in a document:

Step 1: Open the Paragraph dialog window.

Step 2: Click on the Text Flow tab. Uncheck the box next to Automatically. This will turn off hyphenation for the current paragraph style. Or you can make any desired changes to the hyphenation settings, such as adjusting the minimum number of characters before a hyphen is added.

Step 3: Finally Click OK to save your changes.

You can repeat these steps for other paragraph styles, such as Heading 1 or Heading 2, to turn off hyphenation for those styles as well.

Manual Hyphenation In LibreOffice Writer

The automatic hyphenation settings given by the LibreOffice Writer usually work well, but sometimes you may need to add a hyphen manually to a word in a paragraph. To add a hyphen to a specific word in LibreOffice Writer, you can do the following:

Step 1: Press Ctrl and – at the same time. This will insert a soft hyphen into the word.

Tips: Adding manual hyphe­nation or soft hyphen to a word doesn’t require you to turn on automatic hyphenation setting. It works independently.

Summary

This is how you can customize the hyphenation settings in LibreOffice Writer. If you liked the tutorial, or have any suggestion or question about it, please leave a comment below.