Taking a look

@Fox can you provide more detail on exactly what actions you took in LibreOffice Writer to try to enable "automatic syllabification"?
Also, I wanted to make sure we're on the same page regards to terminology. I don't find that in their help docs, but I do find docs on how to automatically hyphenate text (which would relate to needing a hypen package). Are you talking about hyphenation?

If you could walk me through what you did, step by step, I'd like to try to reproduce what you experienced. This may sound nitpicky but I need to know these details to make sure I'm testing what you're trying to do and not something else.

Finally, what version of LibreOffice are you running?
Thanks :)

As a quick test I followed this:
https://help.libreoffice.org/6.0/en-US/text/swriter/guide/using_hyphen.html

Using the instructions for how to automatically hyphenate text in a paragraph I was able to enable the feature with no warnings.
LibreOffice version 7.0.1.2

• Started a new LibreOffice document
• I pasted in a few paragraphs of text into the document from Wikipedia.
• I set the right hand margin smaller than default to force some words to hyphenate
• I enabled hyphenation with Format - Paragraph - Text Flow - ticked "Automatically" under Hyphenation

I saw no warnings or errors.
I also ran Tools - Language - Hyphenation. It completed with no errors.

@TClark77

Thanks for your reply. :)

I mean the automatic hyphenation as you described it. Since I observed the bug, there have been one or two updates, so that I now have version 7.0.1.2 installed.

If I create a new document according to your description, the error does not occur and the hyphenation is correct. But when I save, close and reopen the document I get the error message "Missing hyphenation data: Please install the hyphenation package for the locale "de". I tried it with an English text and there the error did not occur. Under Tools - Language - Hyphenation I also get an error message for German and it looks like the spell checker with Hunspell is installed, but neither hyphenation, grammar nor thesaurus is installed. So it seems to be due to a missing package for German.

Is the system's locale not completely set or is the dictionary simply missing, which can be downloaded from the LibreOffice site? I am careful with this, because as far as I know the installation via eopkg is preferable.

Additional comment (26.02.2021): Hyphenation still does not work with Solus 4.2 and LibreOffice 7.1.0.3. I checked on Ubuntu 20.04.1 where hyphenation in LibreOffice 6.4.2 works correctly with german localisation. It states the package hyphen-de is indeed necessary for hyphenation. This package is not available in the Solus repositories.

In order to hopefully provide more information as the priority Need More Info calls for:

Inspecting hyphenation in Ubuntu, language specific hyphen-** (with ** for the respective language: de, en, etc.) seem to be responsible for hyphenation in LibreOffice. The corresponding dicts are located in /usr/share/hyphen. According to Debian's and Arch's package list, this is true for them as well. And indeed, by copying e. g. hyph_de_DE.dic and hyph_en_GB.dic from Ubuntu to /usr/share/hyphenon Solus, hyphenation in LibreOffice works for these languages. Solus only has hyphen available in its repositories., thus, only hyph_en_US.dic is present in /usr/share/hyphen by default. Subsequently, hyphenation only works for american English.

So far, this can be solved by simply copying dicts from another distro, but it shouldn't be like this. It might also be possible, to get hyphenation by installing LibreOffice's extensions. Yet, this again could be done by default when setting the locale for the system.

Patches submitted for the following languages :

• hyphen-de
• hyphen-en
• hyphen-fr

Marking my task as a duplicate doesn't answer the questions I asked there. I also think my task is not a duplicate of T9131, but let's face one thing at a time.

I proposed some solutions to (IMO) improve the hyphenation situation in the Solus repository. @JoshStrobl could you please give me a feedback?