Created attachment 104700 [details]
Sample document with spaces

Created attachment 104701 [details]
Document rendered without non-printing characters enabled

Created attachment 104702 [details]
Document rendered with non-printing characters enabled

(In reply to comment #0)
> U+3000 IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE, which is a wide space used in CJK text, does not
> show visibly as a non-printing character when View -> Non-printing
> Characters is enabled in Writer.

There is certainly no Interpunct character displayed over the Ideographic Space (U+3000) when Non-printing characters are displayed. There are possibly cultural reasons for this, given that the Middle Dot (U+00B7), which is used for Space (U+0020) and No-break Space (U+00A0), is in the Basic Latin block and some Asian scripts use a centralised dot for a full stop.

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpunct these are the main Asian language preferences:

Chinese: "In Taiwan the Unicode code point U+2027, Hyphenation Point, is recommended by government as a fullwidth punctuation to separate the given name and the family name of non-Chinese." and "In Chinese, the middle dot is also fullwidth in printed matter, but the regular middle dot (·) is used in computer input, which is then rendered as fullwidth in Chinese-language fonts."

Japanese: "Interpuncts are often used to separate transcribed foreign words written in katakana. [...] the Japanese writing system usually does not use space or punctuation to separate words." and "U+30FB ・ katakana middle dot" and "U+FF65 ･ halfwidth katakana middle dot."

Korean: "Interpuncts are used in written Korean to denote a list of two or more words, more or less in the same way a slash (/) is used to juxtapose words in many other languages." and "The use of interpuncts has declined in years of digital typography and especially in place of slashes, but, in the strictest sense, a slash cannot replace a middle dot in Korean typography." and "U+318D ㆍ hangul letter araea (아래아) is used more than a middle dot when a interpunct is to be used in Korean typography."

In accordance with this I am setting the status to NEEDINFO as Asian language (l10n) experts are required to comment further on what would be considered acceptable practice.

> U+FEFF ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE

Please note that use of U+FEFF as ZWNBSP is deprecated since 2002 (Unicode v3.2) and the Word Joiner (U+2060) is recommended to be used in its place.

Thanks for the above comment.
Note that one mitigating factor to the other uses for • in CJK text is that, as of current master (4.4), the non-printing characters are displayed in blue text, rather than black, so there is some contrast there by default.

For comparison, Word for Mac 2011 appears to use a rectangle the width of the ideographic space for this case. This might be a reasonable model to follow.

I think this has all the information it needs - passing to ux-advise.

Could the UX team please evaluate this? Thanks

-> Status: NEW
-> Severity: enhancement
-> Component: ux-advise

The purpose of showing non-printable characters is to manage the text, e.g. to distinguish between repeated carriage return and paragraph space, to discriminate between spaces and tabs, or to identify multiple spaces. 

However if the formatting information is shown directly by WYSIWYG means it makes no sense to clutter the document. In case of zero width non joiners in Farsi I understand the interaction as entering a character plus a ZWNJ which leads to a different letter - but I may be wrong. And according Owen's reply there might be some other reasons to not show special spaces. So why not having a configuration switch?

But we should confirm this by native speakers rather than UX. So I add Kevin Suo from the LO China Blog to the CC list.

(In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #8)
Sorry, I have no much idea on this issue. The only thing I can be sure is that the U+3000 (full-width space) is seldomly used in Simplified Chinese. In contrast, we use the normal space (U+0020) a lot.

In my experience of Japanese documents, full width spaces are used with some regularity for formatting.

In translation (from Japanese), a frequent demand is to ensure that no full width characters remain in the target text - so being able to identify full width spaces visibly would be an advantage there.

Hello. I am Japanese.

(In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #8)
> But we should confirm this by native speakers rather than UX. So I add Kevin
> Suo from the LO China Blog to the CC list.

I want full-width spaces to be displayed.

In Japanese, full-width spaces are used very often.

In Japanese paragraphs, a space is inserted at the beginning of the line.[1] This should use indentation. However, there are users who use full-width spaces as a Japanese convention.

* [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_punctuation#Space

It's very difficult to tell a sentence from a mix of full-width spaces and spaces.
I'd like to see a full-width space to distinguish between the two.

Microsoft Word Japanese version displays full-width spaces.

A tweet from Japanese users being in trouble.

* https://twitter.com/gootalasavolsky/status/1145638413065842689
* https://twitter.com/Rarry_/status/844949678131101700

(In reply to nogajun from comment #12)
> In Japanese, full-width spaces are used very often.

Is the special character dialog/widget with the list of recently used characters a solution for you? Would be nice to have shortcuts, see bug 109215.

We introduced U+200A with big 121596 but I'm a bit afraid of too many space variants. If we implement U+3000 space, it should be for Japanese only.

(In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #13)
> (In reply to nogajun from comment #12)
> > In Japanese, full-width spaces are used very often.
> 
> Is the special character dialog/widget with the list of recently used
> characters a solution for you? Would be nice to have shortcuts, see bug
> 109215.
> 
> We introduced U+200A with big 121596 but I'm a bit afraid of too many space
> variants. If we implement U+3000 space, it should be for Japanese only.

This is about showing non-printing characters with "Formatting Marks" ctrl+f10 functionality. Currently we don't show any other space as the "ASCII" 0x20 space as a dot. 

I looked into this a bit and it is not trivial. Currently we substitute spaces with dots as they are the same or similar width, but for other spaces, we will probably need to do some custom drawing.

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