asciidoc: add cleanspaces option to remove extra spaces

[jnavila]

Extra spaces are removed in no-wrap segments, so that the output conforms to English typography rules.

This fixes GitHub #464

[mquinson]

Hello Jean-Noël, thanks for this patch.

maybe the cleanup should be the default behavior for new users, don't you think?

I'm not completely decided, but it seems somehow better.

Mt

[jnavila]

I don't grasp the idea of "the default behavior for new users". Do you mean that we should somehow differentiate between creating the pot file and updating it? How can we do it, and save the actual state of the option?

For sure, for existing translation project, it is critical to retain the behavior of unset cleanspaces, unless the project manager actively enables it.

[mquinson]

I mean that I would like this behavior to be activated by default, with a big warning in the changelog saying to existing project that they may want to use that option to disable the behavior if they wish so.

I know it may be troublesome to some users, but I think that an optional cleanup is not very different from no cleanup at all.

Does it sound too harsh to you?

[jnavila]

OK, so your option is the harsh one 😆 ... Being the main developer of this feature and being plagued with this issue, I know that this can be cumbersome to change a lot of segments, only for some whitespace issues.

I don't know how you intend to warn user about this compatibility breakage. I would at least issue a warning when such issue is detected and extra whitespaces are detected and removed. So maybe, this option should be activated by default, generating a warning. When the option is set to true or false, the warning would disappear.

Personally, I understand your point: a sane behavior for new projects, but I don't like at all breaking the increasing number of projects already relying on po4a. In any case, it would be a breaking change that needs to be strongly advertised.

[jnavila]

Please note that right now, the patch cleans up the original string of its extra spaces but does not post process the translated string.

[mquinson]

Thanks a lot @jnavila, I merged this as is. You are right about not upsetting the translators by default.