I agree with Gerrit; while all Andreas says is true, it is not an argument against having an option for format-and-indent to intelligently insert specific whitespace in front of (or after) desired elements. (Not only are we suggesting this as an option, I suspect all of us on the "I like this feature" side would agree it should be an option that is off by default, for the very reasons Andreas articulates :-) E.g., adding two new tabs to Options > Preferences / Editor / Format / XML / Element Spacing: 1) Starts new line: Element names or XPath expressions for which the start-tag (or empty-element tag) should be forced to start on a new line (and then indented appropriately) 2) Ends line: Element names or XPath expressions for which the start-tag (or empty-element tag) should be made the last token on a line Both lists should start out empty, of course. P.S. IIRC, last I checked (years ago) those were not "XPath expressions", they were not even full XSLT patterns, but rather were a very limited set of XSLT patterns. If that is still true, I would strongly recommend changing the wording slightly and putting some pop-up help or information right there.
I share Ute's wish for a format-and-indent in the text mode that puts <lb> at the beginning of each line. xml:space does not seem satisfying to me because it prevents Oxygen from doing any format-and-indent. Find/replace is neither very elegant nor will it give the result Syd has described.
I admit that the addition of whitespace in mixed content elements where no whitespace exists is generally critical (and I like Oxygen for not doing this!). However, any whitespace preceding or following an <lb> can be treated as insignificant. Even
Oxy<lb break="no">gen
Oxy <lb break="no">gen
are equivalent, except that a little more processing is needed to extract the token "Oxygen" from such an encoding. So I find it responsible to allow Oxygen---on explicit request---to add whitespace befor <lb> elements. At least, it would be nice to get Oxygen to put all the <lb>s at the beginning of the line that *already have* whitespace before them.