Thank you, Daniel; while I don't completely understand what's going on here,
this is clearly the right answer. Adding "(declare-initial-value
input-whitespace-treatment 'collapse)" to the style sheet that didn't
"normalize" the whitespace causes it to do so, and I observe that the
DocBook stylesheets similarly set this characteristic (and unset it in
places like dbverb.dsl, where leaving whitespace unchanged is the desired
behavior).
The DSSSL spec is notably silent on this; input-whitespace-treatment is in
the spec as a characteristic of characters, but declare-initial-value is not
mentioned at all.
I infer that what is happening is that declare-initial-value is setting a
value for the characteristic that is inherited by all flow objects unless
their specifications supply an overriding value (following the general rules
for inheritance). This results, ultimately, in the setting of the
characteristic on the character flow object, which is where the collapsing
actually happens.
|Date: Tue, 08 May 2001 12:17:19 -0400
|From: Daniel Speck <dspeck@xxxxxxx>
|Subject: Re: (dsssl) "Normalizing" spaces
|
|Mark,
|
|I think you want to set the input-whitespace-treatment characteristic on
the
|character flow object class to 'collapse. You can do this "globally" by
doing
|something like:
|
|(declare-initial-value input-whitespace-treatment 'collapse)|
|
|- -dan
|
|"Wroth, Mark" wrote:
|
|> I have observed that when processed with Norman Walsh's Modular DSSSL
Style
|> Sheets, sequences of whitespace characters in SGML DocBook are replaced
by a
|> single space. [....]
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