[oXygen-user] Pretty Print <lb/> in Oxygen

[Syd Bauman]

I agree with Gerrit; while all Andreas says is true, it is not an
argument against having an option for format-and-indent to
intelligently insert specific whitespace in front of (or after)
desired elements. (Not only are we suggesting this as an option, I
suspect all of us on the "I like this feature" side would agree it
should be an option that is off by default, for the very reasons
Andreas articulates :-)

E.g., adding two new tabs to Options > Preferences / Editor / Format
/ XML / Element Spacing:

 1) Starts new line:
    Element names or XPath expressions for which the start-tag (or
    empty-element tag) should be forced to start on a new line (and
    then indented appropriately)

 2) Ends line:
    Element names or XPath expressions for which the start-tag (or
    empty-element tag) should be made the last token on a line

Both lists should start out empty, of course.

P.S. IIRC, last I checked (years ago) those were not "XPath
     expressions", they were not even full XSLT patterns, but rather
     were a very limited set of XSLT patterns. If that is still true,
     I would strongly recommend changing the wording slightly and
     putting some pop-up help or information right there.

> I share Ute's wish for a format-and-indent in the text mode that
> puts <lb> at the beginning of each line. xml:space does not seem
> satisfying to me because it prevents Oxygen from doing any
> format-and-indent. Find/replace is neither very elegant nor will it
> give the result Syd has described.
> 
> I admit that the addition of whitespace in mixed content elements
> where no whitespace exists is generally critical (and I like Oxygen
> for not doing this!). However, any whitespace preceding or
> following an <lb> can be treated as insignificant. Even
> 
> Oxy<lb break="no">gen
> 
> Oxy
> <lb break="no">gen
> 
> are equivalent, except that a little more processing is needed to
> extract the token "Oxygen" from such an encoding. So I find it
> responsible to allow Oxygen---on explicit request---to add
> whitespace befor <lb> elements. At least, it would be nice to get
> Oxygen to put all the <lb>s at the beginning of the line that
> *already have* whitespace before them.