Evil spaces of doom

Question

Every time I load a page with code on it, Robohelp removes
another space from the indenting.
Simply going between [design] and [html] editors removes a
leading space each time.
I've discovered that the problem is something to do with the
<space> tags that Robohelp inserts.
Attached are two versions of the same code section; the top
is how Robohelp formatted it using space tags, and the bottom
version is how I'm having to re-write things in [html] mode to stop
the space tags from wrecking my layout.
To avoid having to deal with the dreadful text selection in
html mode, I simply replace all occurrances of <space> or
</space> with   in html mode, and then delete any
extra spaces in design mode.
To see what I'm talking about, paste the code below into a
page in html mode, look at it in design mode (the top and bottom
code sections should look the same). Then click back and forth
between design and html modes and the indenting on the top code
section is gradually removed a space at a time.

Answer 1

Peter and other colleagues,
It's related to a bug in the WYSIWYG editor, which I
rediscovered just yesterday. The space is missing in the browser,
but it's in the html output code after the </span> tag. This
is a new symptom of a legacy bug, I think.
When you select text with the cursor, you can highlight the
space before the first word and/or after the last word. However,
when you apply the attribute, RH re-highlights text starting with
the first space and un-highlights the last space. The <span>
tag is after the preceding word but has no space after, while the
</span> tag is after the last word, and precedes the space
before the next word (look at the output; that space is there).
However, it seems the browser suppresses leading spaces.
If this doesn't always happen with one attribute, I think if
you have text that's bold and conditional, for example, the html
can get confused.
Also, what happens if you un-apply an attribute, perhaps
reapply another, edit text at the beginning or end, and so on? What
if you selected spanned text but beginning or ending in the middle
of a word, perhaps beyond the end of the existing span? RH5x and RH
6 sometimes got confused.
The <spaces> code appears to be Adobe's RH 7 version of
kadov (shudder); special characers have
<robohelp>mmmm</robohelp> delimiters in RH source html.
These, too, can confuse things when RH outputs html code around
span tags.
As I said, this is a legacy bug, but in the past you found it
when you had trouble applying and unapplying styles and attributes.
In RH 7, we're seeing the space getting lost in the browser
display, so it's more noticeable.
Last night I thought I'd raise the issue here before calling
it a bug.
Maybe, if Adobe confirms my diagnosis, this can contibute to
the solution.
Harvey
P.S. Another factor may be whether you are using the Windows
character set or UTF-8. I've seen this with UTF-8 and haven't
tested the other.
HK