Whitespace Encoding/Decoding

If the paragraph element or any of its child elements contains white-space characters, they are collapsed. Leading white-space characters at the paragraph start as well as trailing white-space characters at the paragraph end are ignored. In detail, the following conversions take place:

The following UNICODE characters are normalized to a SPACE character:

• HORIZONTAL TABULATION (0x0009)
• CARRIAGE RETURN (0x000D)
• LINE FEED (0x000A)
• SPACE (0x0020)

In addition, these characters are ignored if the preceding character is a white-space character. The preceding character can be contained in the same element, in the parent element, or in the preceding sibling element, as long as it is contained within the same paragraph element and the element in which it is contained processes white-space characters as described above. Whitespace characters at the start or end of the paragraph are ignored, regardless whether they are contained in the paragraph element itself, or in a child element in which white-space characters are collapsed as described above.

These white-space processing rules shall enable authors to use white-space characters to improve the readability of the XML source of an OpenDocument document in the same way as they can use them in HTML. In other words they are processed in the same way that HTML4 processes them.

Space Character

In general, consecutive white-space characters in a paragraph are collapsed. For this reason, there is a special class Spaces used to represent the UNICODE character SPACE (0x0020).

class whitespaces.Spaces(count=1, xmlnode=None)

This element is required to represent the second and all following SPACE characters in a sequence of SPACE characters.

Tab Character

class whitespaces.Tabulator(xmlnode=None)

This class represents the UNICODE tab character HORIZONTAL TABULATION (0x0009) in a heading or paragraph. A Tabulator class reserves space from the current position up to the next tab-stop, as defined in the paragraph’s style information.

Line Breaks

class whitespaces.LineBreak(xmlnode=None)

The LineBreak class represents a line break in a heading or paragraph.

Soft Page Break

class whitespaces.SoftPageBreak(xmlnode=None)

The SoftPageBreak class represents a soft page break within a heading or paragraph.

Soft Hyphens, Hyphens, and Non-breaking Blanks

Soft hyphens, hyphens, and non-breaking blanks are represented by UNICODE characters.

The UNICODE character	Represents
SOFT HYPHEN (00AD)	soft hyphens
NON-BREAKING HYPHEN (2011)	non-breaking hyphens
NO-BREAK SPACE (00A0)	non-breaking blanks