Fixing pasted or imported text that won't break properly and causes large white-spaces between words

The first passage below shows text copied and pasted "without formatting" into a new document. Note that some words break at the end of the sentence, but without hyphenation. Note also that the type is not justified, even though the paragraph style is fully justified. If you try to fix this the easy, normal way you might find that it cannot be done. I'm not going to go into detail to explain everything that won't work; instead I will just jump to a fix that does work.

This fix involved the use of the LibreOffice add-on, "Advanced Find and Replace." Click the link to install it, then save your work, close LO and then re-open it. Now you will see the Advanced Find and Replace icon in the menu bar.

--Frustrating, wrongly-formatted text after copy and paste.

(Be sure to select the text you want to correct before you do the Find and Replace). 

After you install the add-on, click the icon to launch "Alternative Find & Replace." Then make it look like the image below. In the Replace box there is a single space. (So, what you are doing is replacing one kind of space with a different, "normal" kind of space. You don't need to know the details; trust me, this is what you must do to fix your problem.)


Here is the end result.




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