Fantasy Grounds keeps inserting unwanted spaces

[drempel]

I've even tried editing the xml directly but FG just keeps adding these unwanted spaces.

Type anything in brackets, or finish it with a period or whatever. Then make just the words inside bold or italic, and it won't immediately add the space; the text will look as you expect.

But reload the campaign, and there will be a space. Cleanup text, and there will be a space. Copy the text into another record and there will be a space. Edit the XML directly in your favorite text editor to remove the damn space, and it'll put it back.

eg:
... Gnoll</b>) becomes ... Gnoll </b>)

It looks terrible and there's no way to make it look good other than to do:

Gnoll)</b>

then it doesn't insert a second space seemingly happy with one that is already there. And it only looks good in certain contexts, sometimes there's just no way to avoid making the text look ugly and amateur hour.

This happens with all punctionation.

<b>Gnoll </b>. Some other text....

Is especially ugly.

This has been happening for quite some time (feels like years), so I'm surprised it hasn't been reported and fixed by now. Why is it doing this?

I know it exports this way too, and I'm trying to make something nice for the store, and I've seen other modules also suffering from this.

[claedawg]

Are you talking about spaces between lines or spaces between words?

Never seen it add spaces between words (unless there is some weird thing going on with how a PDF was created, if you are copy/pasting from a PDF).

For the line spaces, you just have to go back through the Book or Story card and manually remove the spaces. I do hate that it does that, the origin of the copy does not seem to matter. It happens with PDFs, Websites.

Edit: Pasting from Notepad does not add an extra line.

[drempel]

Nope, has nothing to do copying from outside sources. This is 100 percent internal to FG.

And it only happens when you are bolding or italicing, I'm literally looking at the XML and seeing FG just inserting spaces after I've cleaned it up manually.

Try this.

Type "(gnoll)"

Then just bold gnoll (not the brackets).

It'll look good, like (gnoll)

then exit FG and reload the campaign.

You should see (gnoll )

You can type "the big bad gnoll had bad breath."

and it'll always look fine, it's happy with the space between 'l' and 'h' so it doesn't add one. It just always wants a space after </b> or </i> in the XML and if one isn't there, it adds it (which is wrong).

Coincidently I noticed it adding spaces that it doesn't render before <b> or <i> (which it uses to start bold or italics), and it might explain some of the other weirdness with the editor (phantom spaces that really only become an issue while editing...why did that entire line just go bold while deleting? stuff like that).

It's doing wierd stuff with spaces behind the scenes.

[wndrngdru]

Yep. This is an annoying quirk that's been around for a long time. I first noticed it when bolding a word which is followed by a comma. It bugs me, but I've just taken to bolding the comma with it.

[drempel]

(Sarag CG Gnoll)

Looks terrible though, and (Sarag CG Gnoll) ain't great either, and doesn't follow the formatting of the source material. They need to fix this, I've never seen a text editor/renderer do this. It's an obvious bug and it makes everything that hits this quirk look unprofessional.

[LordEntrails]

It has to do with the xml parsing. You can put it on the Feature Request list, but honestly I doubt this is something SmiteWorks can control. So I doubt there is anything they can do about it.

Most users will never notice or care that the comma, parenthesis etc is formatted. Sure, it doesn't follow the source material, but really, most folks won't be negatively impacted by it.

[Moon Wizard]

Unfortunately, it is an artifact of the original developer's choice to embed the formatted text directly into the XML instead of using CDATA. It has been that way as long as we've been supporting the product; with very few mentions/complaints. Also, the risks of changing it given the extensive back catalog are very high for a minor issue.

Regards,
JPG

[Jiminimonka]

Old problem. Easy solution. If you want the text to look okay without spaces, then make the bracket, comma, full-stop or whatever bold, italic (or underline) as well. So you get Terror on the Dark Frontier. Instead of Terror on the Dark Frontier .

[claedawg]

Been using since Classic and I have never noticed that, lol

[Jiminimonka]

It has been around since the beginning of Fantasy Grounds - it is not a big deal at all.

[wndrngdru]

It has been around since the beginning of Fantasy Grounds - it is not a big deal at all.

Except that it drives my OCD brain nuts. To be clear, I deal with it, but I hate it. I have to willfully not think about it while I do my conversions.

[Jiminimonka]

Except that it drives my OCD brain nuts. To be clear, I deal with it, but I hate it. I have to willfully not think about it while I do my conversions.

I think about it too when doing my conversions and I wrap the parenthesis, punctuation etc. in with the word(s) so they are all bold/italic as well.

[drempel]

Old problem. Easy solution. If you want the text to look okay without spaces, then make the bracket, comma, full-stop or whatever bold, italic (or underline) as well. So you get Terror on the Dark Frontier. Instead of Terror on the Dark Frontier .

yeah, pretty sure we've all figured that out, but it's not always a great option either.

And yeah, it's something that I just hate, glad I'm not the only one.