In this bug:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/1243401
there is a discussion about whether or not the selectable area for a text object should include leading and trailing spaces. That is, for text objects 1 = " " and 2 = " a b " the old behavior was that the "arrow" or "+A" selection pointers would not detect object 1 at all and would move across the leading and trailing spaces of object 2 without registering a hit. The patch in that bug makes these pointers treat spaces like any other character.
People were coming down on both sides of the change and ScislaC suggested moving that discussion here. See posts 20-27 for the discussion so far.
Regards,
David Mathog mathog@...1176... Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech