Working with a custom preprocessor to preserve all spaces

[ratnanil]

I have a quarto document where I would like the spaces to be preserved in the entire document. Based on this stackoverflow answer, I have a created a simple preprocessor which replaces two consecutive spaces with one space and a no-break space, in all *.qmd files, thus solving the problem.

How can I use the output from the preprocessor as the input to quarto render when working in a quarto project? I would like to keep the original files untouched and keep the intermediate files hidden from the user.

Here is the workflow in a bit more detail:

# the following line replaces occurrences of two normal spaces (U+0020) 
# with a normal space and a no-break space (U+00A0) in all *.qmd files
# and saves the outputs to *-2.qmd
for d in *.qmd; do sed $'s/\u0020\u0020/\u0020\u00a0/g' "$d" > ${d%%.*}-2.qmd;done
# the following line renders the project (note that each qmd file is now duplicated)
quarto render

Here are the input and output files:

input (index.qmd):

1

  2

   3

    4

     5 

output in index.html (unwanted output, note the missing spaces):

... (truncated)
<p>1</p>
<p>2</p>
<p>3</p>
<pre><code>4
... (truncated)

output in index-2.html (desired output, note the  ):

... (truncated)
<p>1</p>
<p>&nbsp;2</p>
<p>&nbsp; 3</p>
<p>&nbsp; &nbsp;4</p>
<p>&nbsp; &nbsp; 5</p>
... (truncated)