[PRO]: Conversion API - Preserve whitespaces on Export

[mbukovy]

Affected Packages

Conversion API

Version(s)

current

Description of the Bug

Hello, we're using your conversion API to import and export the docx documents and there's a problem exporting newlines and spaces. This is the example from your demo at Export page

and this is how it looks exported to Word

Browser Used

Chrome

Code Example (Preferred)

No response

Expected Behavior

Preserve white spaces on export so it looks the same as in the editor

Additional Context (Optional)

No response

Dependency Updates

• Yes, I've updated all my dependencies.

[StephanMeijer]

I am not affiliated with Tiptap, but have done some work on Pandoc.

This is expected behaviour of Pandoc. Basically, it is a limitation of the underlying software Tiptap uses.

---

input.html

<p>there</p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p>are newlines</p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p>and sppaces         and spaces     and spaces</p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p>everywhere</p>

Command

$ pandoc input.html
<p>there</p>
<p>are newlines</p>
<p>and sppaces and spaces and spaces</p>
<p>everywhere</p>

[StephanMeijer]

Additional info. In HTML, <p>and sppaces and. spaces. and spaces</p> is equivalent to <p>and spaces and. spaces. and spaces</p>. The same basically for Markdown. In OOXML, empty text inside a <w:t/t> is respeced. So when Tiptap converts from Tiptap's AST to HTML or Markdown, the HTML Reader will just filter out the meaningless whitespace (and probably also the empty paragraphs). The Docx Writer won't have any of the context anymore for doing anything with whitespace preservation, as all that information is (for good reason) lost in the transformation from HTML/Markdown to Pandoc's AST, which they call "native".

You could reproduce this by:

$ pandoc input.html -o out.native   
$ cat out.native 
[ Para [ Str "there" ]
, Para [ Str "are" , Space , Str "newlines" ]
, Para
    [ Str "and"
    , Space
    , Str "sppaces"
    , Space
    , Str "and"
    , Space
    , Str "spaces"
    , Space
    , Str "and"
    , Space
    , Str "spaces"
    ]
, Para [ Str "everywhere" ]
]