Missing whitespace within PPTX paragraphs using OpenXmlSDK

Question

Using the OpenXmlSDK 2.0 I am reading and writing to powerpoint documents. We have a situation where a simple string within a powerpoint document has its whitespace stripped.

The example sentence within a single paragraph occurs when several inline markup changes are made to the one paragraph. It can be a little tricky to recreate the markup below, but writing the sentence in full using the powerpoint markup and then applying the formatting seems to produce the results below.

The quick brown fox.

This results in markup roughly similar to:

<a:p>
    <a:r>
        <a:t>The</a:t>
    </a:r>

    <a:r>
        <a:t> </a:t>
    </a:r>

    <a:r>
        <a:t b="1">quick</a:t>
    </a:r>

    <a:r>
        <a:t> </a:t>
    </a:r>

    <a:r>
        <a:t i="1">brown</a:t>
    </a:r>

    <a:r>
        <a:t> fox</a:t>
    </a:r>

</a:p>

This all looks like it's working fine, and opens correctly within the PowerPoint client. But when opening, making changes elsewhere in the presentation using the OpenXmlSDK, saving and closing the document the markup has been simplified to:

<a:p>
    <a:r>
        <a:t>The</a:t>
    </a:r>

    <a:r>
        <a:t /> <!-- Whitespace missing, causes PowerPoint to ignore it. -->
    </a:r>

    <a:r>
        <a:t b="1">quick</a:t>
    </a:r>

    <a:r>
        <a:t /> <!-- Whitespace missing, causes PowerPoint to ignore it. -->
    </a:r>

    <a:r>
        <a:t i="1">brown</a:t>
    </a:r>

    <a:r>
        <a:t> fox</a:t>
    </a:r>

</a:p>

Is there a trick to indicate in the markup to retain the space? Or another way we can structure these runs to include the spaces?

Answer 1

You need to do <a:t xml:space="preserve"> </a:t>

The xml:space="preserve" tells it to hang on to the whitespace (written from memory - may have the syntax wrong).