I heard many french people complaining that Writer isn't adding the hard spaces automatically before the double punctuation signs. When going through the list of Writer issues on bugzilla.novell.com, I found out that there was an issue filed on that topic n#278233. A quick search on IssueZilla gave me the corresponding upstream issue i#17169 (6 years old).

As I already hacked the autocorrection some times ago, I decided to fix that one quite quickly when my wife was working during the week-end. The implementation took only a few hours: the lengthier part of the process was the creation of the CWS and the build for the tests. My changes have been proposed upstream in the cbosdo01 CWS. After a hard time trying to get it QAed, this CWS won't be integrated before 3.3 as Sun is asking for specifications! The changes have then been committed to go-oo git repo: the patch will be available in 3.2 for go-oo.

Here is a small screencast for the rest of the world: french people will now what I am talking about whithout viewing it.
thumb-hard_spaces.oggEDIT

  • The autocorrection hack I did some times ago wasn't that one... but related to i18n ordinal suffixes.
  • I have been too critic towards the Sun devs who tested that CWS, I have written my apologies here.