XSLT new lines not being preserved

For some reason my spaces aren't being preserved in my final PDF after xslt. My desired output is:

Static

text bold.

Here's my xslt template:

<xsl:preserve-space elements="*" />
<xsl:strip-space elements="" />

<xsl:template match="coverPage">
    <fo:block font-size="12pt" color="black" text-align="center">
        <xsl:text>
            Static
            &#xA;
            text
        </xsl:text>
    </fo:block>
    <fo:block font-size="12pt" color="black" text-align="center" font-weight="bold">
        <xsl:text>
            bold.
        </xsl:text>
    </fo:block>
</xsl:template>

Solution

I think there are a few issues with your XSLT:

there is no need to enclose the text inside xsl:text elements, as those text nodes are not composed only of whitespace characters and therefore will never be stripped (see Whitespace stripping for more details)
for the same reason, there is no need to use xsl:preserve-space and xsl:strip-space, unless of course you need them for other reasons
preserving linefeeds in the transformation from XML to XSL-FO is just the (required) first step, but then you must preserve them during the processing of the XSL-FO file; in order to do this, you must use the linefeed-treatment property: linefeed-treatment="preserve"
a literal linefeed is equivalent to a 
 entity, so in your input you have 3 linefeeds between "Static" and "text", which will produce two empty lines when preserved; if that's not what you want, you have to remove some of them
the words "text" and "bold" are inside two different fo:block elements, so this means they will always be on different lines; if you want them to be placed one beside the other, those words must be inside fo:inline elements instead (and there must be an outer fo:block to contain them)

A final word of warning

While looking at an FO file the difference between a preserved linefeed and an ignored one is not immediately apparent, as it boils down to the presence of the linefeed-treatment attribute in an ancestor element (which could be quite far from the text node itself).

Clearer ways to force a line break in a specific position include:

using different fo:block elements, each one containing the text that should create a line (or several ones)

    <fo:block>Static</fo:block>
    <fo:block>text <fo:inline font-weight="bold">bold.</fo:inline></fo:block>

using an empty fo:block where a line break should be

    <fo:block>
        Static
        <fo:block/>
        text <fo:inline font-weight="bold">bold.</fo:inline>
    </fo:block>