ZWSP are silently taken from language data on copy and paste

[Martin Zaske]

Dear list,

we still love and need the ZWSP feature in Flex. For those who are not
familiar, here is a bit of quote from the Flex help:

---quote
The Zero-width space punctuation character is Unicode U+200B.
It is intended for invisible word separation. It is a non-printing
character.
It has no width, but when you select Invisible Spaces (View menu), a
vertical gray bar appears at the location of each ZWSP character. Then,
you can easily select, copy, paste, or delete them.
For more, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_space or
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/200b/index.htm.
ZWSP characters allow you to gloss or interlinearize individual words in
the text.
---unquote

In early 2013 I have had correspondence about a bug - and it has hit me
again this week and I had to spend time making another workaround:



Flex gladly TAKES the ZWSP characters by copy & paste into any baseline.
Copy & paste is an official way of getting texts into Flex, according to
the help.

But sadly, Flex is bad and greedy (in this domain) and does NOT RETURN
the ZWSP when copy & pasting texts OUT of Flex for further use or
analysis. Instead of the u+200B, we are getting "normal" spaces u+0020.

This should not happen to any part or aspect of our language data: It
should come out exactly like it is - and if certain elements need to be
changed for technical reasons, there should be a clear message or
options for the user how to handle it.

Now understand that we need those markers, that is why we put them in.
And typically 6% of our spaces are such invisible spaces. When taking
(freshly spell-checked) texts out of Flex, they all get dumbed-down to
normal spaces. This is a bad choice because we are loosing needed
information.


Imagine a certain user does not care for ZWSP in his or her data outside
of Flex: With a simple search and replace, all u+200B could be deleted
or turned into something else (even into "normal" spaces). Or there
might be an option in Flex, letting the user decide how to mangle (or
not) data upon any export.

But for us presently there is no automatic way to "get our ZWSP markers
back", once Flex has killed them.




I would like to hear from this list, whether we are the only
project/language needing or using the ZWSP feature. If this were the
case then the developers could - please - correct this bug for us.

Or are there users who use the ZWSP inside Flex and do not want them
upon export for whatever reasons (and who are incapable of doing the
search and replace after export as I have suggested above)? Would a
"nothing" not be better for such users, than a visible space? The beast
was invisible inside Flex after all?

Or are there other users who are suffering from this bug like we are and
who would please confirm this for the benefit of the "to do list".



Please do not tell me that what we need is wrong. Im gine ny other ch r
cter would unexpectedly "diss ppear" upon export from Flex...

I do not need workarounds either - I can make them with some effort. But
such workarounds cannot be taught to our local team because they go
beyond normal copy and paste and it is hard to understand in the first
place why characters can go from our text editor INTO Flex but NOT BACK
into the text editor afterwards.


I please need to hear from the list about this. If we are really the
only ones who need a solution, I will make one and be quiet; otherwise
an official fix would be much appreciated. Thank you.

Martin


--
Martin Zaske; BP 50, Bassila, Benin
+229 97.44.62.95

Every organisation is exactly structured to get the results they are getting.