On Sat, 2014-04-12 at 02:00 +0200, Krzysztof Kosiński wrote:
(especially leading / trailing whitespace) is inconsistent with the rest of Inkscape
It would only be inconsistent if text characters were svg objects. Text spaces are printed to the screen, they are "visible" parts of the text object's construction. Removing text boxes with spaces, not being able to click on leading spaces, these are conclusions which conflate the svg object space with the text/character space.
A good illustration of this:
Create a text box by dragging a square with the text tool. Add ten spaces to the top line, nine to the next and so on until the last line with one space.
This object now has two non-visible areas. One is the transparent non-text area where no characters exist; and the rest is an non-apparent triangle of spaces. Thus one can demonstrate there is really two realms of "non-visible" areas and these result from their two originating contexts.
I conclude that the rules for these two should not be the same.
All the Best, Martin Owens