Oxygen XML Forum

I've seen related topics discussing this, but the solution doesn't seem to apply to version 15.

We need to be able to enter whitespaces by typing rather than using a character map (in particular non-breaking spaces and em-spaces). This seems possible using the unicode for them, however as they are not visible it proves for difficult proofreading etc.

Is it possible to be able to view these whitespaces? - We basically need to be able to see that they've been entered etc.

NB: Whilst using the html entities for them means something is visible, these don't work during further stages - The xml files are producing a printed book going through InDesign and the unicodes work whereas the html entities don't.

Hopefully that makes sense - I'm a bit of an xml/html novice...

Hi,

In the Oxygen Preferences->Editor page there is a checkbox called Show TAB/NBSP.... marks. Just check that one if you want NBSP to be visible when editing.
There is another checkbox there for showing spaces but it refers only to simple spaces.
So unfortunately that would not work for other special space characters like em-spaces. I will add an improvement to our issues list to maybe add another option for that.

NB: Whilst using the html entities for them means something is visible, these don't work during further stages - The xml files are producing a printed book going through InDesign and the unicodes work whereas the html entities don't.

Probably a bug in InDesign, any XML-compliant processor should be able to interpret character entities like !.

Regards,
Radu

Hi,

Thanks - that's a great help, have been searching everywhere for that!

The ability to see/distinguish an em-space (or indeed any fixed width space) would be extremely helpful - we are publishing transcription data of correspondence, in which fixed width space is indicative.
I'm sure this feature would be of great use to other similar humanities projects as well.

I don't suppose you know the likelyhood of that making it into a release in the near future?

Thanks again!

Hi,

I added this issue for Oxygen version 16 which should be released next year in summer.
But I cannot guarantee it will definitely get implemented in this particular release. I will update the forum thread when this happens.

Regards,
Radu