[reggoboy]

The code was trimming the input, so that's why that behavior was occurring. I'm still going leave the trimming behavior in there when typing in values, because far too often users would leave spaces at the start or end and then complain when they had multiple instances of a specific group type, or cite issues with synchronizing due to having created multiple groups that only differed by a space. However, when picking from the auto-completion entry, I will allow honor whatever value was selected and not trim it. 

Yes! I totally agree with all of this.

My preference would actually be to just always trim the names so that you couldn't enter a space when creating a new collection, but some users may be relying on that, so I won't remove it. It seems like it would be better to have a character that is easier to see though, like a period, underscore, etc. It's just far too easy for users to be confused by spaces, especially at the start.

Yes, I also agree that spaces are confusing and not the ideal choice. 

I just tried a leading period, and it seems to get ignored by the sorting algorithm. Underscore is the same. 

If I deselect the Normalize Characters setting, these sorting problems go away, and I can use a leading underscore, and those sort to the top. But I don't want to lose the feature where Danço sorts like Danco. Personally, I don't think underscore belongs in that same class of characters. Maybe there could be a separate setting for "Strip Extraneous Punctuation", and if people really want to strip or ignore underscores or periods, they can enable that; but then Normalize Characters can be reserved for real diacritical marks, and not punctuation. That would solve this problem without having to use leading space characters. 

That's just an idea.