Warning about Non-breaking spaces in Flare 9.1.1!

[Msquared]

Flare uses Shift+Space to enter a non-breaking space (shows up in topics as   in the text editor). It's quite easy to enter one of these by mistake if you type fast. I quite often end up with them instead of ordinary spaces immediately before upper case letters in my topic text. This is irritating if you didn't intend it, but wasn't usually fatal until version 9. Now it can be. So heed my cautionary tale.

In Flare 9, you can enter NBSPs in filenames (for example, topic names, snippets, conditional tagsets) and in things like condition tag names and variables. This is a pain in filenames, and fatal for conditions (they don't work).

I created about 20 snippet files the other day, and couldn't understand why they just would NOT sort in alphabetical order, which meant I couldn't easily locate my carefully designed and named snippets. Eventually, I realised that the filenames had random NBSP sprinkled in them, depending on whether I'd inadvertently help the shift key down or not when I entered the spaces in the filenames. This was a real pig to sort as I had lots of spaces in my filenames, and couldn't see which were ordinary spaces and which were NBSP. And all my files were in Source Control, with all the renaming pain that involves, and I couldn't see where the NBSP were there either. Sorting this took hours I could ill afford.

Today, I created a new condition set, and some conditions. They too are riddled with NBSP, and Flare crashes when you try to use them. But of course, again, you can't see you've entered a NBSP in the condition filename, and won't notice that you've done it for the conditions themselves unless you look in the XML (or you see a crash).

This is partly my fault, I think . Until Flare 9, you couldn't enter a NBSP in the value of a variable, unless you added it directly in the text of the target file. That's one place where you really may want an NBSP, so I submitted a feature request for that. If I'd known that some enthusiastic MadCap developer would get carried away here, I'd not have bothered, and continued to insert them by hand. Sorry folks!

I don't know what the answer is here. But I'm going to be extremely careful what I type when I specify filenames and any other sort of names from now on, and where possible, check the XML as I go to ensure that I've not included any unintentional NBSPs by mistake. Perhaps someone has a better idea?

PS. That well known Micros**t product uses Ctrl+Shift+Space for NBSP, so it's almost impossible to enter one accidentally. Anyone care to join me in submitting a feature request?