Chris,

I always get very nervous with generating spacebands. In general I think it should be avoided but of course there are the cases that you are forced to do so, like the case you presented here. 
Have you tried what happens when you enter the (new) -xpp-word in the display property of the <open> element?
(one would think that it would be best to put in the close::after but the display property is ignored in the ::before or ::after pseudo elements)
I don't think it will solve your problem but it is certainly worth a try...

Here is a test division (no space but hyphenates properly):

and here is the same one with a space but not hyphenating:

Thanks for the hint but it makes no difference! I think I have enough proof to report this as a bug - do your agree Bart?

Chris,

This sounds very much like a known limitation of composition, where a word that ends in generated text (that begins within the same word) will not be (or cannot be) hyphenated.

You still might want to open a ticket, so that it can be verified if this is the case.

Jonathan Dagresta

SDL XPP Engineering

Thanks Jonathan - I will open a ticket but the period is being generated and it hyphenates with that - it also splits at line breaks if that is the right thing to do.

Chris,

Another idea ...
What if in close::after generate your dot and space through a macro that starts with a '!' using the -xpp-macro() construct in the content property?
This would signal to the system that the current word has ended.
I had quite some success with this in the past.
Whether it will work in a CSS/content/-xpp-macro() construction remains to be seen...

Curious if this will work or not...

Oh and wait another thing you can try:
- transform your macro with the ! and the . + space as a PI into the xml - that should be easy enough and it will never invalidate the xml
- you can try with generating that PI before or after the </close> tag

Now I am even more curious...

Interesting text by the way
Confirms my opinion that the UK was never really part of the EU ...

I wondered when you would comment on that - I was just looking for a simple job!

Bart,

I tried the ! macro route but it makes no difference UNLESS I put it in the open::before and then it works - I really don't want to have to do this as the combinations of consecutive (not nested) elements will cause an awful lot of unnecessary testing and complications. 

Did you try with inserting the !macro as a PI physically into the xml stream?
there are 3 different places where you can put the macro: before </close>, between </close><open> and just after <open>