[KevinH]

I have *no* plans to implement the workaround approach done by Kovid any time soon.

When parsed by an html engine all entities (numeric and named) are converted to their character (byte sequence) equivalent during display parsing, so using entities changes nothing for the person viewing the ebook.

FYI: Sigil's gumbo parser handles that conversion from nbsp entity to byte sequence and back and not a plugin.

That only leaves the editing of html. If you do not want to deal with entities during editing, simply choose *any* other character from the huge unicode set that is not being otherwise used and replace all non-breaking spaces with that character until you are done editing the ebook. Then substitute them back to non-breaking space entities right before saving.

Both of these can be done easily with regular expressions and can be stored as searches or clips you can easily invoke.

Sorry, not being able to tell the difference between non-breaking spaces and normal spaces when editing an ebook is a real problem no matter the language and using a placeholder of some sort (entity or some other character) is the way to make things work.