How do you fix bad indentations and a lack of paragraph spacing?

  • mawrgorshin · Member ·

    I just posted a new essay on the Shakespeare play, Henry V. If you click on the link, you’ll see the indentation is a mess where the quotes are, and the main body of the essay has, apart from even worse indentation problems, pretty much no separation of paragraphs, even though in my draft, all the paragraphs and indentations are correct. I have no idea how to fix this problem. Is there a way I can SEE where the problems are on the ‘Edit Post’ page (i.e., bad tabs, etc.), as opposed to how it looks on my blog page?

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • timethief · Member ·

    If you are copying and pasting from a word processing document like Microsoft WORD note that if you use the Paste as text button then a special cleanup process will run to remove any special formatting and HTML tags that may otherwise change your text.
    http://en.support.wordpress.com/visual-editor/#pasting-text

    Whether or not you are copying and pasting go to > Dashboard > Settings > Writing and enable this setting:
    Formatting
    __ WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically
    “save changes”

    Blog editors and word processors are not the same and do not work the same way. The web standard is one blank line only, so you cannot add more blank lines by pressing return repeatedly like you would do with a typewriter or in a word processing application. If you want to learn how to format and space your posts and pages see: http://en.support.wordpress.com/advanced-html/

    P.S. When you create a new post, always make sure the Format tool is set to Paragraph before you start typing. It’s in the Visual editor Row 2 first position “style”. See the illustration here http://en.support.wordpress.com/visual-editor/#row-2 If you forget to do that then edit the post, highlight all in the Visual editor, select Paragraph from the Format tool, switch editor to Text then switch back to Visual and click Update.

    For editing see:
    http://en.support.wordpress.com/posts/edit-posts-screen/

  • mawrgorshin · Member ·

    I made the changes as you said, and the thing in the second row was already set to ‘paragraph,’ but my post looks exactly the same as before. I’d used cut and paste for quotes before, but in my attempts to fix the problem, I removed all of the cut and paste parts.

  • timethief · Member ·

    Indentations can happen when you use the Quote (blockquote) icon 6 in Row 1 of the Visual editor.

    They can also happen when you use the icons numbered 8 and 9 in Row 2 of the visual editor.
    Outdent – move text further left
    Indent – move text further right

    To fix what you have going on requires switching and using the Text (HTML) editor and removing the code that’s causing your issues there.

    Types of WordPress Editors

  • mawrgorshin · Member ·

    I just went through it with the text editor, and cleaned it all up. It’s great now. Thanks! Analysis of ‘Henry V’

  • timethief · Member ·

    Well done! It looks fabulous now. Best wishes with your blog.

  • mawrgorshin · Member ·

    Thanks again! :)

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