Empty square after references when opening OO documents in Word

[dstillman]

While Simon fixed #875, it seems Word doesn't actually support the Unicode word-joiner character that we're inserting after references in OpenOffice to prevent additional text from becoming part of the citation. So we've just transferred the rectangle from OO to Word.

This will only affect people who open a document created with the OO plugin in Word (or other programs with shoddy Unicode support), but that includes if it's flattened, saved as an RTF, etc.

I wasn't able to find any zero-width or narrow-width Unicode characters that work in both OO and Word. The no-width Unicode characters that Word offers to insert via Insert->Symbol->Special Characters actually have different special meanings and would cause problems in programs that interpreted them correctly.

So, do we a) remove this functionality from the OO plugin and let users get out of the fields themselves, b) find some character that actually works in both, or c) figure out some other way to place the cursor outside of the field without actually inserting an extra character in the field?

It seems that, if users can do it manually, (c) should be possible...

[jonrubin]

Just had a backwards thought on this and hope it's helpful: rather than trying to fix the 'can't get out of the field' problem after the citation has been inserted, why not fix it before?
The problem arises when somebody inserts a citation at the end of a line and then can't get out of the field. Why not, before inserting the citation, simply insert a normal space, then move back a character (GoLeft), insert the citation, and then after the citation is inserted, move the cursor forward past the space you inserted (GoRight). That way the user is out of the field and no unicode characters that Word doesn't support have been inserted.
Hope that makes sense and was helpful.

[simon]

Depends on Ben's work on the pure Python OOo plug-in

[simon]

(In [3359]) closes #1013, Empty square after references when opening OO documents in Word