#47 Whitespace being dropped

[Steven Calderwood]

In topic2icmlImpl.xsl file the following directive drops whitespace-only inline elements (e.g., a character style in Word only applied to a space will be dropped at InCopy generation, which makes for a grammatical error in the resulting text):
<xsl:strip-space elements="*"></xsl:strip-space>

My expectation would be not to have any such elements dropped. An alternative solution would be to add this to the documentation so that users knew what was happening and how to override it.

[W. Eliot Kimber]

The challenge here is that leading and trailing whitespace in most cases is not wanted. I think the better solution is to simply not have inlines consisting of only whitespace.

But it is a challenging issue because no single answer will be correct for all input documents due to the fact the InDesign itself doesn't do whitespace normalization. If it did then you could just safely pass any whitespace in the original XML to InDesign and let it short it out.

Will have to think about what the best general solution is.

[Steven Calderwood]

Ah! I hadn't thought of that problem. That makes sense.

[W. Eliot Kimber]

Is this issue still relevant?