fmommeja

Thanks @walt.farrell for the suggestion.
The issue is effectively solved in Publisher 2.4 beta.

Nope, I'm downloading it right now.
I'll tell you.

Here's a typical workflow for us (we're a newspaper/magazine publishing company). Editorial is written in a (proprietary) app running MySQL (most editorial systems do similar). The writers never open InDesign.
A section will be applied to stories (Front Page, EGN, Real Estate, Features, Entertainment, Sport etc) In our particular case, we apply styles based on section. EG. Front page heading might be Helvetica Black at 120/110 where basic news might be Helv. Bold 72/70. Captions will be different as will Bylines and Intros. This general style is set as soon as they select the Section but editorial staff can also add styles to any word or text run and custom tags will be added to the text. If we want a word in Bold for instance, it might be simply enclosed in <b></b> tags which are interpreted by the app into correct InDesign tags before insertion into the database. This is all handled by the app - editorial staff never have to enter any tags. It also calculates depth and shows previews so they can be sure sizing is correct (they can manually over-ride a heading for instance)
Once the story is saved to the database, a companion app is used to call stories onto the page. It creates (by script) the required frames and labels them with the Story_ID, partID (Heading, Sub Head, Caption, Intro, Body, pull-quote, Cross Head etc). Then the story is placed (by script) and the tags are interpreted by InDesign so the text is formatted exactly to style - regardless of which section they've chosen. Editorial staff know nothing about styles, they simply allocate stories to the correct section.
The real beauty of this is it requires NO styles to be set-up in InDesign - so no, it doesn't map existing styles - it is totally independent of character or paragraph styles and can be done on a brand new machine with a clean install and still work.
It also handles updates and corrections. If a journalist changes a story, removes words, changes sections or italicises different words in a story that will all be reflected when the story is re-imported and the text will always be formatted correctly. Updated stories are flagged in the Place app so prepress people know they need to be updated.
I should point out it places images and brings them in with styled captions. It has functions to send directly to Wordpress (and Apple News) and the styles are automatically translated - although these are mapped to the existing styles on those platforms.
Everything I've said, importing text, setting styles, linking captions with their images, styling heading, sub headings, intros, bylines and body text is ALL done with scripting and tags. Scripting in professional publishing isn't about creating fractals and pretty lines. It NEEDS to be able to manage large quantities of text and format it seamlessly.
Here's another example. Someone builds a 400 page catalog. All the data is in a database with tags. It can be flowed onto pages, frames created and labeled based on sku numbers, text formatted, images placed and styles and colours applied based on the section of the catalog. You could potentially build the entire thing in a few minutes.
I appreciate you're trying to get this working but I'm not sure exactly which users you're trying to engage with. This has been one of my concerns since starting this thread - many of the people commenting sound like they have never scripted Quark or InDesign - they seem more intent on pushing their favourite programming language.  
I'm sorry if I'm sounding harsh but I'm staggered the functionality of scripted document production and tagged text needs to be explained. It's really automated publishing 101.
The line in your post I find most interesting is "We're software developers not publishers". This is why you need to be talking to publishers. Do you think Adobe created InDesign without speaking to Quark users?
The reason our system works so well is because it was written by someone who had more than 20 years experience in publishing before starting it. You're never going to satisfy users if you don't know what they need.

> Those of us who would love to experiment with it early would send an invaluable feedback to the devs, which in my opinion is as important as the release itself. And those who love living on the edge would start using it early and learn what works what what doesn't.
Absolutely. Good point.

@Peter Kahrel if you are the author of "GREP in InDesign" I must say thank you for the great book.

Thanks @fmommeja and @MikeTO I've replicated the issue and passed it over to the developers.

Well, I saw in FontForge that there was no content for the U+2007 character…
I copied the space character content (U+0020) to U+2007 then copied the width of a W letter (U+0057) that fitted to my needs for a Figure Space… saved, generated the new .otf file… Et voilà ! ^^

Just been at the phone with a publisher I'm editing a project for, and we were discussing about how to manage three streams of notes with InDesign.
Ah, how good it would be to have a layout program that can manage multiple streams of notes…
Paolo
 

I add couple more:
1. The ability to split books into multiple files. My books I have exported get a resource error when I try to import them into Publisher. (as urgent as footnotes).
2. Paragraph composition. 

Hi fmommeja,
 
Thanks for the file - I've reproduced this and will get it passed on to development to see if they can do anything. I believe dashed lines can be a bit tricky to get accurate - Illustrator gives an even less accurate result!