Blank line problem in Wordpress

17 Feb 12 3:14 pm

easyrider wrote:For some unknown reason my Wordpress site using Affilotheme has just started to prevent me from having an extra blank line between paragraphs and before headings etc.

When I try to add an extra blank line in by using the nonbreaking space ( ) after a paragraph and then putting a blank line after this, it removes both the blank lines when I save it or preview it. This just does not make any sense as I haven't changed any settings.

To have more formatting options on your wordpress site, you can install the tinyMCE Advanced plugin.

To install the tinyMCE Advanced plugin, please log in to your WordPress admin area, click on "plugins" and then click on "add new".

Type "tinyMCE Advanced plugin" in the search field and click search plugins. Then click "install now" for the tinyMCE Advanced plugin, click ok on the pop up message box, and then wait for it to be installed. When it's done installing, click "Activate Plugin".

You will first have to configure the tinyMCE plugin to get the additional formatting options. To do that, go to Settings > TinyMCE Advanced and select the formatting buttons that you would like to have in addition to the buttons already available. After you have made your selections, click Save Changes.

You also need to make sure that you are in Visual mode when adding or editing a post instead of HTML mode so that you will be able to see the formatting buttons.

18 Feb 12 1:36 am

I have already got the TinyMCE plugin. When I select the following advanced option my formatting is not changed when I go to the HTML view and then come back to the Visual one:

Stop removing the <p> and <br /> tags when saving and show them in the HTML editor This will make it possible to use more advanced coding in the HTML editor without the back-end filtering affecting it much. However it may behave unexpectedly in rare cases, so test it thoroughly before enabling it permanently. Also line breaks in the HTML editor would still affect the output, in particular do not use empty lines, line breaks inside HTML tags or multiple <br /> tags.

However, it becomes hard to actually see where anything is in the HTML view since it is now just one great block of text.

The fact is that everything was working fine until a couple of days ago and then something changed. But I don't know what happened.

I was using the non-breaking space after a paragraph break to create the appearance of a second blank line between the paragraph and a following heading (it does not look very good if there is only one blank line). When I first started with Wordpress, I tried to just hit enter a couple of times to create to blank lines, however it always automatically was reduced to one when I updated the post.

I found that adding the non-breaking space after a paragraph created the extra space that I wanted (even if this is not the purpose of the non-breaking space).

Unfortunately now Wordpress automatically removes both the extra space and the original blank line when I either go to the HTML view, update the post, or preview the post.

02 Mar 12 1:24 am

As an update, I have removed my new web browser IE9 and gone back to IE8 and everything now works fine. I am not sure why this would be the case, but I am grateful it works.