Many users ate confused when they have carefully positioned their audio with an initial offset (white/gray space) that when they Export the track this offset is ignored and the exported file starts immediately with the audio with no offset.

This particularly confuses multi-track users who export and subsequently re-import
tracks and are surprised/puzzled when their tracks no longer line up properly;  See this Forum thread for an example: https://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=80408

What such users expect is that the white/gray leading offset space be treated as silence on export and rendered as such.
b) it is certainly treated as silence if you Play such an offset audio track from T=0
b) If the track has embedded white/gray space between audio clips upon export those embedded chunks are rendered as silence to preserve the relative  positioning of the clips.
c) Mix&Render in contrast preserves leading whit/gray offsets

So what we have here looks to be somewhat inconsistent - and it is quite realistic on the basis of a) and b) that the user might expect leading white/gray space to be included and rendered as silence on export.


The simple solution to this is to ensure that leading white/gray space is optionally rendered as silence on export, with T=0 as the track start time. 
Also Export Selected Audio should render any such leading white/gray space that is part of a user's careful selection as silence.
Trailing white/gray space should be ignored and not rendered as silence


But note that we would also need to retain the old behavior whereby the leading white/gray space is ignored on Export.  The use case for this is track-based multiple export where the user has "songs" lined up one after the other on different tracks - and in this case would not want the offsets exported as long silences at the start of "songs".


I suggest therefore that we add a new Preference to the Import/Export Preferences in the "When exporting tracks ... " section:
"Render leading empty space before audio as silence" - default = "on"

I deliberately use "empty space" - as although we internally use the term "white space" most users have no idea what that is - plus the fact that it has been gray-space for a long while now.