I have not read the spec regarding these attributes recently, but I was wondering whether the treatment of whitespace in the fo file defaults to the normal whitespace treatment in xml files if no special white-space treatment attributes are specified.
I had an xsl stylesheet producing fo, that resulted in different rendered output (from FOP 0.20.5) if the fo xml document was pretty printed or not. This caused me a problem, as I was changing from running xml through the xslt engine, and serializing the result to a file (which was adding the pretty-printing) then supplying this fo file to FOP. The new process of sending the sax events from the xslt engine directly to FOPs content handler did not get any extra (supposedly meaningless) whitespace added, yet produced different rendering results. The workaround for that particular stylesheet was to add only a single <xsl:text> </xsl:text> to generate one space between two elements, resulting in a sax characters event, and restoring the desired rendering behaviour. (Note: the desire at the time was to get what was previously being produced, irrespective of any fo spec conformance.) I can't find the stylesheet now, but I thought that the location of that single space should have been meaningless as far as xml was concerned, and I'm now wondering whether the xsl:fo spec contradicts what I thought was normal whitespace treatment, when no whitespace related attributes are mentioned. (My thought at the time was that it was just a 0.20.5 bug.) >From memory the fo was something like ...</fo:block><fo:table>... vs ...</fo:block> <fo:table>... Stephen Denne.
