OOo deals intelligently with spaces during cut/copy/paste and D&D of text in
most cases. However, if there is punctuation at the edge of the selection, it
fails. For example, if I select parenthetical text including the parentheses and
drag to a new location. OOo will not (as it normally would) insert spaces
before/after the insertion, nor will it remove excess spaces from the source
location (leaving a double space). This effect is also seen with other
punctuation marks (e.g. full stops, commas).

This behaviour actually closely mimics a defect in MS Word, at least as far as
parentheses are concerned, but it is easily fixable to work consistently with
all text. The default behaviour should be to handle spaces normally in such
cases (especially, to remove the excess spaces from the source location).

Similarly, if I drag a selection next to but *outside* parentheses, OOo fails to
insert spaces correctly to separate the insertion from the parenthesis. This is
slightly different - OOo should handle spaces differently depending on whether
the destination is within the parentheses (which will not require a space
between the insertion and parenthesis) or outside them (which will require a space).

Even if I select a word surrounded by parentheses (but not the parentheses
themselves), OOo fails to insert spaces correctly around the word at its
destination. This is presumably a failure to recognise that the selection is a
complete word (having non-whitespace characters at each side at its source),
even though it is selected with a double mouse click (so part of the code
recognises the word boundaries).