[xsl] whitespace normalization around keyword-like phrases

["Imsieke, Gerrit, le-tex gerrit.imsieke@xxxxxxxxx" <xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Folks,

Over the weekend Ibve been writing a whitespace normalization stylesheet 
that transforms input like
<emphasis>Nested<glossterm> phrases </glossterm>with whitespace </emphasis>
into
<emphasis>Nested <glossterm>phrases</glossterm> with whitespace</emphasis>

This is often useful when converting content that was created by word 
processing or DTP applications. Probably for typographic reasons, they 
tend to include a trailing space in the wrapping element (or rather, 
they suggest that you include trailing spaces when you select words). 
When converting such a styled phrase to a keyword, a glossary term, or 
another semantically significant element, this extra whitespace should 
be moved away from its original location and placed after the inline 
element.

The challenges have been:

b Dealing with nested elements.
b Not only dealing with whitespace on the right-hand side, but also on 
the left-hand side and on both sides of an inline element
b Also considering punctuation and space-like characters in addition to 
whitespace.
b Making sure that any trailing punctuation is not extracted from the 
footnote paragraph (and placed into the surrounding paragraph) if the 
footnote is wrapped in a styling phrase. DTP applications often put 
footnote markers b and with them the whole footnote b in styled phrases.
b Making it customizable for different vocabularies (it currently 
supports DocBook, TEI, and JATS).

The XSLT has some features that may be of general interest, in 
particular passing the relevant text nodes as tunneled parameters and 
the footnote scoping.

But read for yourselves: 
https://github.com/gimsieke/emphasis-normalize-space

Gerrit