On 2014-02-22 Jan Tosovsky wrote:

when a punctuated phrase appears at the beginning of the line, it is not protruded correctly when preceded by an index term.

... \index{foo}>Bar< ...

A minimal example is available at http://drifted.in/other/sample.tex

I cannot place the space character between these two parts (which helps) as I sometimes need to join this and the previous phrase with the non-breaking space.

It is more serious issue than expected. Consider next two variants: (1) sentence, \index{primary}>Primary< (2) sentence,\index{primary} >Primary< When the line is broken after a comma: ad 1) starting guillemet is not protruded ad 2) ending comma is not protruded When \index is surrounded by spaces from both sides, the space is rendered at the beginning of the next line (resulting in 'indenting'). :-S I'd be grateful for ignoring any non document content preceding punctuation to avoid its influence on protrusion. Thanks, Jan