Reach must render space between inline elements separated only by a space, but it does not

Hope, forum, you can help me with resolution. So far I was unsuccessful.

When the DITA content includes a space that is intended for display, the SDL Reach transform does not render the space in the output. We are trying to fix this.

Example:

When DITA file contains line <cmdname>cmdname_content</cmdname> <option>option_content</option> (space between cmdname and option), in Reach topic view we have cmdname_contentoption_content.

Would appreciate any suggestion on how can we modify Reach html transforms to preserve these spaces?

Looks like it affects Reach output but not HTML5 WebHelp or PDF.

Thanks

Natasha

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  • Hi,

    I am in language service and DITA content is one of the file types we localize regularly. We also received a similar complaint from our client saying that whitespace between two inline tags gets removed in the translation.

    Can you please point me to DITA specs where whitespace between two inline elements should be preserved under any certain circumstances?

    I am asking this question because in other cases, all whitespace gets removed between two inline elements. An example is uicontrol elements inside menucascade element.

    Any information regarding this would be much appreciated.

    Thank you,
    Naoko
  • I skimmed the standard specification of OASIS DITA looking for xml:space="preserve" which in essence is the driving factor to indicate if spaces are significant or not. Unfortunately it does not look consistent at first sight. It can give you guidance for all elements, probably because the whole document type definition files (DTDs, XSDs) are written with complex inheritance.

    So regarding your example about <menucascade> (the parent element), you can see it described on docs.oasis-open.org/.../menucascade.html where xml:space is missing. The main idea of this structure is that only the <uicontrol> are used at rendering time.

    A <codeblock> is a classic example where whitespace matters as you can see on docs.oasis-open.org/.../codeblock.html indicated by xml:space

    In general my advise would be to treat all whitespace as significant!