title: Converting XML to plain text - how should I ignore/handle whitespace in the XSLT?
body: <p>I'm trying to convert an XML file into the markup used by dokuwiki, using XSLT.  This actually works to some degree, but the indentation in the XSL file is getting inserted into the results.  At the moment, I have two choices: abandon this XSLT thing entirely, and find another way to convert from XML to dokuwiki markup, or delete about 95% of the whitespace from the XSL file, making it nigh-unreadable and a maintenance nightmare.</p>
  
  <p>Is there some way to keep the indentation in the XSL file without passing all that whitespace on to the final document?</p>
  
  <p>Background: I'm migrating an autodoc tool from static HTML pages over to dokuwiki, so the API developed by the server team can be further documented by the applications team whenever the apps team runs into poorly-documented code.  The logic is to have a section of each page set aside for the autodoc tool, and to allow comments anywhere outside this block.  I'm using XSLT because we already have the XSL file to convert from XML to XHTML, and I'm assuming it will be faster to rewrite the XSL than to roll my own solution from scratch.</p>
  
  <p><i>Edit: Ah, right, foolish me, I neglected the indent attribute. (Other background note: I am new to XSLT.) On the other hand, I still have to deal with newlines.  Dokuwiki uses pipes to differentiate between table columns, which means that all of the data in a table line must be on one line.  Is there a way to suppress newlines being outputted (just occasionally), so I can do some fairly complex logic for each table cell in a somewhat readable fasion?</i></p>