Thanks for the separate report!

An other case on idwiki (maybe easier to deal with):
http://zimfarm.kiwix.org/mwoffliner/idwiki/Julie_Estelle.html

Reported on Kiwix bug tracker:
https://sourceforge.net/p/kiwix/bugs/745/

Any news on this bug?

The reason why this happens is because the Parsoid renders <link> tags for categories and whitespace between link tags becomes significant for rendering. But, the PHP parser strips category tags completely along with any whitespace between them.

We could potentially selectively strip whitespace between link tags for template content (but not top-level content without additional complexity in tracking source offsets accurately -- required for serializing edited html back to wikitext without dirty diffs).

This seems like mostly a minor rendering issue, so it hasn't been prioritized higher.

@ssastry Thank you for the detailed answer. I can only agree that this is not the top issue. That said, with mwoffliner perspective, we had two reports in two different wikis, so this visual effect seems to be clearly visible for users. I cross the fingers to see it fixed at some point.