Mail And Non-Breaking Spaces

I posted a topic some time ago and had zero (0) answer to it. Here it is once again.

Mail doesn't know what to do with non breaking spaces (alt-spacebar). It simply ignores them. The right encoding is there all right (I checked) but Mail acts exactly as if it were an ordinary space.

This forum treats those non breaking spaces correctly. TextEdit treats them correctly. But Mail doesn't and hasn't done for several year now.

This is a major irritant in French, where the rules of typography dictate such a space before all high punctuation (question mark and all that).

Does somebody know something about this, and why Mail behaves like such a bad guy?

RTP, annoyed

G5 1.8Dual, 2GB RAM, Mac OS X (10.4.8), 20" App Dsplay, ext. Lacie, iPod, Bach on Al-Lansing, Canon 5D, Canon L glass

Posted on Jan 17, 2008 8:08 AM

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Posted on Jan 23, 2008 11:28 AM

I It would be quite nice indeed if you tried to reproduce what I observe and tell me that yes, it seems to be a bona fide bug, or no, you do not observe it and then I must see if something is wrong with my system instead of reporting a bug which is not a bug.


No problem, also useful just to make sure we are talking about the same thing. Here is what I observe:

+When inputting text into Mail, using either the keyboard or the Character Palette to create nbsp U+00A0 does not work. Only an ordinary space U+0020 is produced.

+When Mail receives a text that contains nbsp, it does recognize it and will not break at that space when the window size is adjusted.

Is that the same as for you? It is certainly a bug.

I think a possible work-around might be to use U+202F (narrow no-break space) instead of nbsp. This does seem to get input correctly into Mail.
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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jan 23, 2008 11:28 AM in response to RTP

I It would be quite nice indeed if you tried to reproduce what I observe and tell me that yes, it seems to be a bona fide bug, or no, you do not observe it and then I must see if something is wrong with my system instead of reporting a bug which is not a bug.


No problem, also useful just to make sure we are talking about the same thing. Here is what I observe:

+When inputting text into Mail, using either the keyboard or the Character Palette to create nbsp U+00A0 does not work. Only an ordinary space U+0020 is produced.

+When Mail receives a text that contains nbsp, it does recognize it and will not break at that space when the window size is adjusted.

Is that the same as for you? It is certainly a bug.

I think a possible work-around might be to use U+202F (narrow no-break space) instead of nbsp. This does seem to get input correctly into Mail.

Jan 23, 2008 6:49 AM in response to RTP

Nobody here works for Apple and can tell you why Mail behaves the way it does in this area. I've never seen a "fix" mentioned anywhere.

I also can't remember anyone else ever raising this problem here. Has it been discussed in other forums or mailing lists? If so I'd be interested in the references.

Have you sent feedback to Apple or used the bug reporting channel?

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

https://bugreport.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/RadarWeb.woa/wa/signIn

Jan 23, 2008 3:26 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

Thanks! I had observed that I could not, whatever the method, put a nbsp into Mail. I cannot:

- type it directly;
- use the Character palette;
- paste it from another application, say Word, or TextEdit, or whatever.

One always get an ordinary space apparently.

I tried to send me an email from my .mac account in Safari. It appears correctly in Safari, and received correctly by Mail, as you observed.

But then, Mail gets rid of it as fast as it can... If I answer to this message, the quoted text has lost its nbsp. So a bug it is, and I will report it.

Thanks for the info about the narrow nbsp. I will experiment on this tonight and report about it. I will look, among other things, for a keyboard key or combination keys to type it, at least on my own keyboard (Canadian CSA).

Regards,

RogerG

Jan 23, 2008 6:23 AM in response to RTP

Trying to give a third life to this topic. I have have 0 (zero) answer to this until now. May I humbly suggest that at least one of the high-powered Top Users that I see on the right give some consideration to this question?

Or is there nobody that knows anything about non-breaking spaces?

Still in very good humour here up North, under more than four feet of crisp, powdered, non-breaking snow.

RogerG

Jan 23, 2008 9:27 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

Sir:

I know perfectly well that (almost) nobody works for Apple here. This being said, before sending a bug report, it's common procedure to try and see if others have met the same difficulty. It would be quite nice indeed if you tried to reproduce what I observe and tell me that yes, it seems to be a bona fide bug, or no, you do not observe it and then I must see if something is wrong with my system instead of reporting a bug which is not a bug.

I invite you to take a look at my unanswered questions. You may ask yourself why so few people answer topics nowadays. If you look at my "answered" questions, see the number of them that I solved by myself because very few people chimed in. There is one reason for this, but I do not want to enter this debate once again.

This was kind of you to give me the proper references for bugs, even if I knew them already, which you could not know, as I have reported several bugs in the past.

In the mean time, I will continue to try to find a work around for this problem, and what is as important, how my posts are received in Entourage, Windows, or web-based email systems. I will then report my findings in this same topic.

Thank you for taking the time to answer my post.

Regards,

Roger Gauthier aka RTP, The Photographer Who Came From The Cold
Sainte-Sophie, Québec, où il fait bon vivre

Jan 24, 2008 1:47 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

Sorry Tom, I was out for the day (a matter of $$$ in fact 🙂 ). I will be able to give full attention to this in a few hours max.

When you say "attribute a key or combination key", do you mean modify the keyboard mapping by creating a .inputplugin file as described by Apple?

Thanks a lot for taking all this time, I do appreciate a lot.

RogerG

Jan 24, 2008 4:59 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

OK, Tom, I tried your keyboard and it doesn't appear to work. This combination key is in conflict with at least one, probably two that I already have: one for the input keyboard (I have deactivated it and it still doesn't work), so there is probably something else somewhere which is in conflict.

But I get the idea. This Ukelele affair is quite fun and easy to use. I will jump into it in the following days and find something that works on my system.

I will mark this question as "answered", even if the answer is not entirely satisfactory (a bug... 🙂 ). I will send a report to Apple tomorrow about this, as it really seems to be a bug. What surprises me is that this bug appeared somewhere along the line (10.3. something if I recall) and apparently nobody seems to bother. Few people apparently bother to format an email correctly.

I thank you very much for your help in this. I learned several things. I learned, among other things, that some people still bothered to try and help even when problems were not simple, and their solution, not obvious at all. You put a lot of time on this, and Discussions are much better when knowledgeable people answer like you did.

Thanks once again,

RogerG aka RTP

Jan 24, 2008 5:54 PM in response to RTP

OK, Tom, I tried your keyboard and it doesn't appear to work. This combination key is in conflict


Do you mean it works ok but just not the input of 202F via alt/option + shift + space? I am puzzled about the conflict -- the input keyboard shortcut is normally command + space (not alt/option).

In any case, you've raised an interesting problem. I did a blog entry for it:

http://m10lmac.blogspot.com/2008/01/work-around-for-mails-nbsp-bug.html

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Mail And Non-Breaking Spaces

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