> Your context node is a "covers" element. Does this have a "covers" child? If
> not, you want normalize-space(.) (or you can omit the argument, it defaults
> to the context node).
Quite right, normalize-space(.) would have been what I needed.  However
this does not fix my issue.  I'm using Apache's FOP-0.20.5, and with
some further investigation I found that fop does not support
normalize-space().  (I apologize.  That should have been one of the
first things to check.)  

This leaves me in search for alternatives to prevent/remove the space
between my bracket and the text.  Perhaps you know of a function off
hand?  If not, no worries.

Thank you for your time.