Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Normalizing spaces?

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

/ "M. Wroth" <mark@astrid.upland.ca.us> was heard to say:
| Hmmm.  The behavior I asked about was the "normalization" (possibly
| not the right word) of spaces  in element content (specifically,
| although not limited to, <para> elements), in the SGML version of
| DocBook processed with the Modular DSSSL Style Sheets.

The odd thing about your question is the example. SGML systems discard
whitespace from element content (the content of chapter, book,
procedure, etc.), but not from mixed content. A paragraph is mixed
content, so DSSSL shouldn't be throwing away spaces.

| I observe that multiple whitespace characters (newline, tab, and
| space) show up in the output file as a single space character.  This
| behavior is not universally present (i.e. in other DTD and other style
| sheets, such concatenation is not observed).  I'm   trying to
| understand how this works.

Can you identify some specific content models in other DTDs where the
effect is different. And what other tools?

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | We discover in ourselves what
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | others hide from us, and we
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | recognize in others what we hide
                                   | from ourselves.--Vauvenargues