Prevent insertion of multiple spaces between words in normal text

[Drew]

Just moving from Arbortext to Oxygen now. In Arbortext, if you are editing "normal text", e.g., in a paragraph (

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<p>

), and you hit the Space bar more than once, you do not get multiple consecutive space chars; it automatically keeps only one space char. In code samples (e.g.

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<codeph>

,

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<codeblock>

) you can of course insert multiple consecutive space chars.

I haven't found how to prevent Oxygen from inserting multiple space chars in "normal text" contexts. For example, if I insert an

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<xref>

element I need to be sure that there is a (single) space char before and after that element, so the surrounding text looks OK. Similarly, if I delete a word, in Oxygen I'm left with two consecutive space chars.

It's a pain to try to tell whether there is a space char, and only one space char, in such contexts. Sometimes I need to zoom in and check carefully.

Is there a simple way to get the behavior I'm looking for with Oxygen?

Thx.

[Radu]

Hi Drew,

Indeed Oxygen allows you to insert multiple spaces even in non-space preserve areas.
We have a plan to remove this flexibility but we were skeptical to implement this because sometimes it's useful to allow two consecutive whitespaces, for example if you want to insert an extra word before two words, you may want to insert a second space between them and then move the caret one position to the left and add that word.
As far as I know having multiple spaces in the content should not influence the publishing output in any way.

Regards,
Radu

[chrispitude]

FrameMaker has an option for this ("Smart Spaces"). Unfortunately, sometimes we need it (example reports from software output) and sometimes we don't (regular body text). Personally I'd like this capability, but with the ability to exempt certain elements from it.

[Radu]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the feedback. Indeed if we implement this improvement of preventing extra white spaces between words we will probably do that only for elements which are not space-preserve, so you will probably not need an extra way to specify the excepted elements because Oxygen already knows the space preserve elements.
I will update this forum thread if we manage to implement this in a future release.

Regards,
Radu

[chrispitude]

Thanks for the feedback. Indeed if we implement this improvement of preventing extra white spaces between words we will probably do that only for elements which are not space-preserve, so you will probably not need an extra way to specify the excepted elements because Oxygen already knows the space preserve elements.

Ahh, that would work perfectly. Thanks Radu!