DOCBOOK: Re: Extra Spaces Caused by <indexterm>s

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

/ Jeffrey Oldham <oldham@codesourcery.com> was heard to say:
| Thanks for the explanation.  The answer may be obvious to someone who
| understands the implementation, but it is not obvious to me.  TeX

This isn't really an implementation issue, per se, it's an XML issue.
In mixed content, you might reasonably expect

  <p>some          spaces</p>

to be treated like

  <p>some spaces</p>

but there's no practical way that the processor can know that

  <p>some <foo/> <foo/> <foo/> <foo/> spaces</p>

should be treated the same way. Those intervening foo tags, even if
they aren't (always) rendered in the output, are still constructing a
series of non-adjacent spaces. TeX would do the same thing, as
I recall, if you wrote:

  some \hbox{} \hbox{} \hbox{} \hbox{} \hbox{} spaces

| users can reveal. In contrast, if I construct a DocBook file with a
| lot of blank lines, they are compressed into a single space.

Not if you put indexterms or some other tag on each of those lines :-)

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | Curiosity never killed anything
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | except maybe a few hours.
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee |