Comment 14 for bug 608631

There are a lot of uncertainities here for me. For instance, it seems it's already possible to use this without any special support from Launchpad. How used is it? Why is it not in any of the guidelines, and especially, is it being proposed upstream as well? I'd be happy to simplify this for French translators, but I wouldn't like to accept this before we get upstream and Ubuntu l10n team buy in first. And as everybody agrees on this bug, it's not necessary to be able to use it.

Also, displaying an explanation is going to be hard because this character would only appear in translations (descriptions for newlines and spaces come from them being in the original English string). And how would we let people learn about it when they are translating an untranslated message?

So, for now, until we get a more widespread recommendation that this is desired (and especially, agreement regarding both nbsp and nnbsp: which is used and when), I wouldn't like to introduce more code for us to maintain even if it's such a small bit. When there's upstream and Ubuntu l10n buy-in, please let me know and we can discuss introducing the one true way to do these things (i.e. either nbsp or nnbsp, and both only if that's really a must).

For now though, closed with "Won't fix", at least until there is enough widespread support for using it (for instance, if you can give me a count of upstream GNOME/KDE translated strings that are using NNBSP as opposed to NBSP, and that's a reasonably big ratio, I'd very happilly change my mind). If you solely want to work on a nice visual tag for displaying them (instead of inputting them), please re-open the bug as well :)

PS. As a side-note, we are doing test-driven development in Launchpad, so you'd have to provide appropriate tests for this feature as well if we were to accept it.