textcolor consumes whitespaces

[LupinoTech]

Whitespaces after the opening brace of the text argument of \textcolor{<color>}{ <text>} consumes the whitespace, while other \text-Macros (like \textbf{ }) don't consume trailing whitespaces. I would like to suggest to ensure that all \textXY macros behave the same way when it comes to trailing spaces.

\RequirePackage{latexbug}
\documentclass{article}

\title{}
\author{}
\usepackage{color}
\parindent0pt

\begin{document}
Foo\textcolor{red}{ Bar}

Foo\textbf{ Bar}
\end{document}

(same with xcolor instead of color)
test.log

A potential fix could be to define \@textcolor as \def\@textcolor#1#2#3{\protect\leavevmode{\color#1{#2}\relax#3}} to eliminate the effects of the \ignorespaces that comes with \color, iff the community decides that this is an issue and that \textcolor{} should behave like \textbf{}.

[davidcarlisle]

\color has \ignorespaces so that

Foo\color{red}     Bar

acts like

Foo\bfseries    Bar

and drops the spaces, although of course the space dropping is happening at a different level and

Foo\bfseries\space Bar

has a space whereas

Foo\color{red}\space Bar

does not.

The case shown is effectively an instance of ths second case where pre-tokenised spaces are dropped for color but not a font change.

The change you show would of course have the effect described, but I do wonder if it's safe to change the spacing here after 30 years, especially as other cases with pre-tokenized spaces would still show differences.

[LupinoTech]

The change you show would of course have the effect described, but I do wonder if it's safe to change the spacing here after 30 years, especially as other cases with pre-tokenized spaces would still show differences.

probably not. Maybe one could give a simple package option that if set preserves spaces, and if not set, it keeps the old behavior?