Only highlight selected text, not to margin[Good Workaround]

[oo1812]

Hi, when I select text in OOo writer, (either by dragging the mouse or shift/arrow keys) it highlights the entire area from left margin to right margin. There are situations where I would like to see at a glance if blank lines are truly blank, or if they have extraneous spaces or tabs in them and, similarly, to see if there are extra spaces at the end of a line.
The ctrl+F10 (view | nonprinting characters) feature is workable but not as comfortable for me as the default selecting behavior of most other programs I've used; which is to only highlight characters that are there, immediately making invisible/nonprinting characters visible.
I've played with most of the settings in Tools|Options|OOoWriter and searched help and forums for 'selecting text' and 'highlighting' but haven't found any way to change the way it highlights when I'm selecting text. Any help would be appreciated, thanks

[Hagar Delest]

The only workaround I've found is to modify temporarily your Default paragraph style : in the Stylist (F11), right click on the Default entry, then Modify, in the Background tab, select a color to be applied for Character.

Then, undo this modification to go back to your 'normal' view.

Thanks to add '[Solved]' in your first post title (edit button) if your issue has been fixed.
_________________
Now on the EN user community forum

[JohnV]

You can use Find & Replace for this. Search for, without the quotes,
" *$|\t*$" (All spaces immediately before a paragraph break OR all tabs immediately before a paragraph break.)

You will need to check the Regular Expressions box then click Find All. Note the leading space above.

You should be able to record this and assign it to some key combo.

[ftack]

Indeed, the suggestion of Hagar is a nice and quick approach to temporarily highlight all characters present. JohnV showed you how to locate instances of lines with only spaces or tabs. I wanted to add that in Wordprocessing, you generally should avoid using empty paragraphs. Spacing should be controlled by the paragraph properties, which you ideally should control using paragraph styles. So my advise will be: get rid of all your empty paragraphs.

* to get rid of the tabs and spaces on empty lines, Search for John's expression " *$|\t*$" and replace with nothing (regular expressions checked).

* To get rid of the empty paragraphs, search for "^$" and replace with nothing (reg expressions checked)

* Edit and apply appropriate styles to customize spacing. Using styles, you'll format your document automatically and error free.

[oo1812]

nice; changing the character background creates the visual cues I was looking for, and finding out about regular expressions makes the cleanup much faster. ~thank you