Non-visible characters
Non-visible characters
I would love to find a way to have oXygen support showing invisible characters such as non-breaking spaces. In the Text mode I can enter   (or  ) and when going back to the author mode those are automatically rendered to their actual character. The issue is when you go back to the text mode, you no longer see the text that describes the character because it has already been rendered. In the case of invisibles it is extremely hard to determine is that character a space, or non-breaking space? Same goes for things like hyphens and non-breaking hyphens. I'm not having any great ideas here myself, but thought maybe you folks might be able to come up with something clever.
Re: Non-visible characters
Hi Wayne,
If you open an XML DITA topic in Oxygen in the Text editing mode, insert " " then switch to the Author mode, make changes and then go back to the Text mode the entity reference should be preserved exactly as it was, as an entity reference not as the equivalent character.
If this does not work for you, maybe you are working with a CMS which does this conversion between entity reference and the character when Oxygen saves the XML content to it, but this would be a limitation in the CMS, you can work with XML files on disk to see if you can reproduce the problem.
Coming back to the idea of showing certain invisible characters, in the Oxygen Preferences->"Editor" page there is a checkbox "Show tab/nbsp/eol/eof" which maybe you can enable, it should show you a small marker over each nbsp character both in the Text and Author modes.
Regards,
Radu
If you open an XML DITA topic in Oxygen in the Text editing mode, insert " " then switch to the Author mode, make changes and then go back to the Text mode the entity reference should be preserved exactly as it was, as an entity reference not as the equivalent character.
If this does not work for you, maybe you are working with a CMS which does this conversion between entity reference and the character when Oxygen saves the XML content to it, but this would be a limitation in the CMS, you can work with XML files on disk to see if you can reproduce the problem.
Coming back to the idea of showing certain invisible characters, in the Oxygen Preferences->"Editor" page there is a checkbox "Show tab/nbsp/eol/eof" which maybe you can enable, it should show you a small marker over each nbsp character both in the Text and Author modes.
Regards,
Radu
Radu Coravu
<oXygen/> XML Editor
http://www.oxygenxml.com
<oXygen/> XML Editor
http://www.oxygenxml.com
Re: Non-visible characters
Thanks Radu. Seems you're correct on all fronts here. It is something the TextML database is doing, not oXygen. After more testing it seems standalone oXygen is handling this correctly it's only in our CMS client that it is not. We're using an older version of oXygen still so we don't have that 'Show' option. We'll just have to live with this a bit more until we migrate to the new CMS client early next year.