Re: whitespace at the beginning and the end of element content

[Yoshihiro Toda <ystoda@yahoo.co.jp>]

The attached is my stylesheet I use to normalize whitespace before
applying DocBook XSL stylesheets.

The stylesheet does nothing but to text nodes.  For text nodes, it
concatnates series of whitespaces (including indentations and
newlines) into one space and the leading & trailing whitespaces are
stripped. It's not perfect and the code is ugly and requires some
adjustments, but really useful for those like me (and you) who want to
use indentations in <para>s.

Some languages, like CJK, do not use spaces at all in a sentence
(whichislikethis), so the default treatment of whitespace in the XML
specification is quite troublesome.
If your document is not in CJK, 'normalize-space()' might be enough to
achieve this.
-- 
Yoshihiro Toda
mailto:yoshihiro_toda@mac.com

unfill.xsl.gz