Need help? Check out our Support site, then


WordPress.com Forums » Ideas

Suggestion: WYSIWYG Editor *with* Whitespace Support

  1. bloodsong
    Member

    No, the "Visual Editor" is not what I mean.

    What I mean is...

    When I type five spaces for an indent, my paragraph indents rather than reverting to full flush left. Or, in geek-speak, my five spaces are replaced with code for five non-breaking spaces.

    When I type two spaces after a period, my period has two spaces after it, not just one.

    When I hit enter five times in a row, I get five blank lines; not just one. Or, in geek-speak, my five endlines are replaced with code for creating multiple blank lines (which is currently <p> </p>).

    I can do this on numerous forums (well, SMF and Iconboard, let's say); I would really appreciate if my WordPress blog could support it as well.

    The blog I need help with is bloodsongtermagant.wordpress.com.

  2. 1tess
    Moderator

    Be that as it may!
    Here are some techniques which work as things are now:
    http://wpbtips.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/formatting-text-pt-2/
    http://wpbtips.wordpress.com/2009/06/10/formatting-text-pt-1/

  3. thesacredpath
    Staff

    A couple things. You are to a certain extent fighting web standards here (and wordpress believes strongly in web standards.

    1. Space after a sentence ending punctuation, or between words: 1 space.
    2. Space after a paragraph is one blank line.

    Yes, some places and some web editors allow you to have blank paragraphs within a post or page, but that is not per standards and is also seriously bad from a search engine standpoint since they expect paragraph to have actual, real content between them, not just a non-breaking space.

    If you want your paragraphs indented or extra space between paragraphs, use the inline CSS that Tess points you toward in those posts.

  4. josephdunphy
    Member

    @thesacredpath: "wordpress believes strongly in web standards"

    Then WordPress needs to get over it. Standardization is for machine parts, not for creative work, like writing. The service is here to serve the users, not the other way around.

    @ bloodsong: I think that this would be an excellent idea. For now, Blogger might be a better choice for you than WordPress, as it does allow far more of the kind of formatting that you seem to want. eg. one can insert tables into a post, and set the attributes for them as one wishes, allowing one to play with whitespace.

    Looking through the forum, you might notice that users have, for years, been making the extremely reasonable request that they be allowed to do their own layouts, instead of being forced to choose from one of a limited collection of templates, functionality that both Blogger and Tumblr have offered for years, without anything horrible happening as a result. These requests seem to fall on deaf ears, not even being answered, when I see them being made in the archives. So, precedent would suggest that they won't give this idea a reasonable response, either, for the foreseeable future.

    For some people, that's not an issue, yet, but for you, it seems to be, so WordPress.com might not be a good fit for you.

  5. timethief
    Member

    @josephdunphy
    Just in case you have not located this entry in support documentation and it does prove to be helpful, I am providing a link to it. http://en.support.wordpress.com/writing-and-formatting-poetry/

  6. josephdunphy
    Member

    Thanks, Timethief. Nice introduction, gets right to the point and explains a lot of what would be most interesting, and I got something new out of it. I didn't know that one could change fonts inside of a pair of pre-formatting tags.

    So there's no misunderstanding, though - I'm not the OP. I wasn't saying that I was about to jump ship. My own spacing needs on WordPress, so far, have been fairly simple ones, easily met by inserting a blank space graphic as an illustration. That doesn't solve the OP's problem, which is that of moving text along a line, because WordPress won't respect "align=left" and "align=right" attributes in images, as I recall, but it's enough to create a little whitespace between the title, the body of the post, and the comment box on the bottom, which I think looks nice.

  7. ontheliner
    Member

    btw sacredpath - "2. Space after a paragraph is one blank line."

    Despite what you say, my constant bleat about the new Coraline is that when you're in Visual Editor mode and you click "Enter" at the end of a paragraph to create a new one, it produces TWO lines of white.

    That's one reason why I edit in HTML mode to ensure a single line of white spacing.

    Likewise when you add an image with the text wrapping round it in Visual Editor, an *extra* line of white appears at the next paragraph break, showing as   . Taking these out adds several extra keystrokes to routine editing!

Topic Closed

This topic has been closed to new replies.

About this Topic

Tags