How do I prevent Ink from collapsing whitespace?

[besttof]

I have a fictional terminal-like setup and I want to do ASCII drawings (and other fixed width formatted text) like these:

  ┌─────────────────┐
  │                 │
  │                 │
  ├──────────┐      │
  │          │      │
  │          │      │
  │          │      │
  └──────────┴──────┘

But when I get the text from the Ink api the whitespaces are collapsed and I get:

┌─────────────────┐
│ │
│ │
├──────────┐ │
│ │ │
│ │ │
│ │ │
└──────────┴──────┘

Using a special character to stand in for a space and replace that afterwards could work, but is quite cumbersome and error-prone. I can't do a custom tag or other bespoke postprocessing because, by the time I can process the string, the whitespaces are already collapsed.

I guess I'm looking an option or special syntax that would prevent Ink from collapsing whitespace. Does that exist?

[Selsynn]

Hey!
That's an easy question once you understand how typography and web actually works. You don't want a classic space, that will be stretched out or in by the rest of the paragraph. You actually want a "non-breakable space" instead of your space.
Each time you want your space to have a fixed size, replace it with   that is the HTML code for the non-breakable space and you will be good to go.

It will show as something weird for where you are writing, but in the inky preview, you'll see already that you are good for it. Just make sure that the HTML code will be good enough for your final viewer (and make an early test in your final viewer to make sure it's still working fine) For example, this one will work fine in the web export as it's purely HTML, but I'll run more test before using project wide on some other tech I may be less familiar with.

I hope my answer helped you out, even if I answered way after you asked.