Inserting a space between joined words will do the wrong thing for URLs,
An URL broken across lines is broken already.
hyphenated words
These could only be hyphenated manually, and therefore can be expected to be dehyphenated also manually. Adding or not adding a space matters less than the manual hard hyphen which stays anyway.
and probably Chinese text.
This one may be real, but I think it's enough to rely on xml:lang if it ever becomes a problem.
The problem shouldn't arise if we allow typing directly into a shape, with Inkscape doing the line breaking: Inkscape can retain the space characters where they exist, as well as retaining newlines.
Of course. We're only discussing the command to convert old multiline text objects to flowed text.
[How would newlines be stored in SVG? Is newline recognized as such in the 1.2 draft spec, at least for textflows?]
Yes, see <flowLine/>
- "Unix hacker's approach": Don't insert spaces. The user will compensate,
Manually removing unneeded spaces if we insert them will likely be much less frequent than adding them if we don't. Let's not overengineer this simple command until spaces really become a problem.