Indentation isn't preserved in comments

This is by design. We retain leading spaces by converting them to HTML non-breaking spaces. But if we did that for *all* spaces in descriptions and comments, that would make pages scroll horizontally in mobile browsers and other narrow windows, making Launchpad less usable overall.

Perhaps we need to switch back to showing bug descriptions and comments in a proportional font, like Trac does, to make it clearer that patches etc should be attached instead of being typed as comments.

We include diff excerpts in comments, while discussing a change being proposed. It doesn't
make sense to attach that kind of comment. Making it clear that Launchpad doesn't support
pre-formatted text in comments is making it clear that it lacks a feature pretty much every
other issue tracker in the market offers.

I could argue that preserving spaces is even more important than mobile browsers, since it's a
more common usability problem to the market Launchpad is targeting, but we don't have to
discuss this. I'm sure there are ways to prevent the usability bug described above without
sacrificing the other kind of usability you're after.

A few suggestions:

1. Convert any sequence of spaces where n > 1 to   and on n == 1, preserve it as
a normal space, thus introducing a breaking point. The principle here is: why would someone
enter more than one space in sequence in a text area if it wasn't supposed to be preserved?

2. Introduce breakable spaces between unbreakable spaces.

Check http://labix.org/tmp/break-me.html for an example.

Ah, excellent idea! We could convert consecutive spaces into strings of alternating breaking and unbreaking spaces.

Instead of alternating, I would suggest converting consecutive spaces to all   except the last one:
  word_____word -> word    _word
(so that the browser never wraps before a   leading to misalignment).

Or, you could forget &nbsp; entirely and just use <p style="white-space: pre-wrap" /> or <pre style="white-space: pre-wrap" /> to solve the horizontal scrolling problem:
  <http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/text.html#white-space-prop>
  <http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/10/html-css-trick-for-displaying-code.html>

Just a note that this bit me in a non-patch situation, see

   https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/317136/comments/2

and the comments following it. (That comment would not have been appropriate as an attachment, IMHO.)

I tend to agree with Gustavo that supporting formatted text is important. I've seen lots of comments in bug trackers where people essentially do ASCII art to illustrate something. Maybe in an ideal world we'd get away from ASCII art, but... it's the standard right now :-).

Not even all leading whitespace is preserved. Leading tabs are converted into leading spaces:

        This line starts with eight spaces.
 This line starts with a tab.

fwiw merge proposals do get this right (example https://code.edge.launchpad.net/~mbp/bzr/progress-output/+merge/14944).