Reach must render space between inline elements separated only by a space, but it does not

Hope, forum, you can help me with resolution. So far I was unsuccessful.

When the DITA content includes a space that is intended for display, the SDL Reach transform does not render the space in the output. We are trying to fix this.

Example:

When DITA file contains line <cmdname>cmdname_content</cmdname> <option>option_content</option> (space between cmdname and option), in Reach topic view we have cmdname_contentoption_content.

Would appreciate any suggestion on how can we modify Reach html transforms to preserve these spaces?

Looks like it affects Reach output but not HTML5 WebHelp or PDF.

Thanks

Natasha

  • Hi there. I know that this has been reported as an issue to the Reach team. There was discussion around developing a fix for it (it may be Reach specific and you've not indicated your Reach version). I'm not sure if that fix has been made available or not. Please contact SDL Support and ask for a status update.

    Pam Noreault | Knowledge Center Solutions Architect

  • Thanks Pam. Since Natasha's request we learned that this issue had been fixed in a patch to Reach 7.5.
    SDL backported part of the patch to 7.4 for the part of our organization that still uses Reach 7.4.
    Initial tests on the 7.4 version of the patch are successful. I want to do one more test before giving it a pass for production.
    There are incident numbers and patch IDs. If it helps I can look them up.
    James Smith
  • Hi,

    I am in language service and DITA content is one of the file types we localize regularly. We also received a similar complaint from our client saying that whitespace between two inline tags gets removed in the translation.

    Can you please point me to DITA specs where whitespace between two inline elements should be preserved under any certain circumstances?

    I am asking this question because in other cases, all whitespace gets removed between two inline elements. An example is uicontrol elements inside menucascade element.

    Any information regarding this would be much appreciated.

    Thank you,
    Naoko
  • I skimmed the standard specification of OASIS DITA looking for xml:space="preserve" which in essence is the driving factor to indicate if spaces are significant or not. Unfortunately it does not look consistent at first sight. It can give you guidance for all elements, probably because the whole document type definition files (DTDs, XSDs) are written with complex inheritance.

    So regarding your example about <menucascade> (the parent element), you can see it described on docs.oasis-open.org/.../menucascade.html where xml:space is missing. The main idea of this structure is that only the <uicontrol> are used at rendering time.

    A <codeblock> is a classic example where whitespace matters as you can see on docs.oasis-open.org/.../codeblock.html indicated by xml:space

    In general my advise would be to treat all whitespace as significant!