Occasional spacing bug on creation of a cross-reference link

Tim Frost · Unread post by **Tim Frost** » Sun Aug 31, 2008 6:56 pm

When writing new help content I frequently double-click on a word, type Control-L and then return. This creates a link to an existing topic or anchor that matches the word I have just double-clicked, and converts the selected word in the text to have blue colour and an underline.

With version 5, I occasionally see cases where, when the word is at the start of a line, an extra space appears in front of it and the space following it is removed. It does not happen every time. I recall this as similar to an annoying problem which was fixed some years ago. It is an annoyance again! The problem is that the extra space ahead of the word is not visible until the paragraph is reformatted to a new width in the final manual, and the lost space after the word is easy to miss when you are doing a series of these operations.

Unread post by **Tim Green** » Mon Sep 01, 2008 11:55 am

Hi "tfrost",

Hmm... I can't reproduce this, even if I manually include the space after the word in the selection, which doesn't happen if you double-click. Have you found any scenario in which you can reliably reproduce this behavior?

Tim Frost · Unread post by **Tim Frost** » Tue Sep 02, 2008 7:02 pm

Since you ask, yes! I have done some experimenting and found the repeatable conditions, which may be too obscure to bother about! The target has to exist already as a simple topic reference, and its first character has to be a '$'. There may be other non-alpha characters which have this effect; I have not looked for them. The matching word you select has to be at the start of a line which is not the first line in a paragraph. Select the whole word including the initial $, hit ctrl-L, return, and the following space jumps to become a preceding space. Now that I know the conditions, I can be more careful about doing this!

Unread post by **Tim Green** » Wed Sep 03, 2008 6:47 am

Hmm... Still can't reproduce it. If you could mail us a small project demonstrating the problem I'd like to have a look at it, just zip it and mail it to support AT ec-software.com (replace the AT with @). Otherwise I'd also generally avoid using non-alpha characters as the first character in a topic ID. For maximum safety only use a..z, A..Z, 0..9 and _ in IDs, and don't use _ as the first character.