https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41652

stfhell <[email protected]> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                 CC|                            |[email protected]
            Summary|“NO-BREAK SPACE” (U+00A0)   |"NO-BREAK SPACE" (U+00A0)
                   |interpretated incorrectly   |interpreted as fixed-width
                   |                            |space

--- Comment #5 from stfhell <[email protected]> ---
I think this should be classified as an enhancement rather than a bug. The
current behaviour is in fact ancient word processing practice, predating
Unicode standards. U+00A0 became the successor of the old "hard space" defined
for use with ASCII codesets, and changing the treatment of U+00A0 would break
countless documents which purposely use hard spaces as _fixed-width_
non-breakable spaces (with abbreviations like "Dr Freud", "i. e." or
punctuation like "« Bonjour! »", "5 %" etc.). It would also be not compatible
with current MS Word practise.

However, distinguishing between different forms of white space is a
typographical need and should be addressed somehow. DTP software like InDesign
has all sorts of spaces: em space, en space, nonbreaking space, nonbreaking
space fixed width, third/quarter/sixth/hair/thin space (1/3, 1/4, 1/6, 1/24,
1/8 em space), figure space, punctuation space. LibreOffice has "space" and
"hard space" (and of course Unicode spaces like U+202F and U+2009, which it
handles better than MS Word).

Jan_J (bug 49674 comment 2) proposed to use the Unicode word joiner U+2060 with
a normal space to get a non-fixed-width non-breakable space. But U+2060 is a
zero width non-breaking space inhibiting line breaks at both sides which is
"intended for disambiguation of functions for byte order mark" (Unicode 6.2).
That does not sound like a good candidate for such a space (and one would need
the triple U+2060 + U+0020 + U+2060, wouldn't one?).

Users definitely also need non-breakable _fixed-width_ spaces, and if LO
redefined U+00A0 as of non-fixed-width (in accordance with Unicode) - what
character should be used for the classical "hard space"? MS Word displays "box
characters" for symbols not defined in the active font, which should be kept in
mind. (I know it cannot handle U+2009, but I haven't tested U+202F.)

A practical solution would probably be to let the user decide on a per
document-basis how to interpret U+00A0: fixed width or proportional? That is,
to add a configuration option under "Writer/Compatibility". But even then one
should _still_ be able to use all necessary kinds of spaces at least in ODT;
they may need to be converted for DOC/DOX export, however, because of MS Word
limitations.

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