Too Much White Space

[brianhayes]

I know about the change to the effect of pressing return - it now starts a new paragraph. OK. But why do I suddenly see so many posts with masses of white space at the end of them? It's as though the poster has hit return 10 or 20 times. It's possible, but I've not seen it before. Anyone else seeing this mass of blank lines?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Like this.

[JWSOUNDGROUP]

Yes, I have seen the added blank lines at the end of the text in posts. Really annoying and I have even gone in an edited posts deleting these lines that cause all the white space. You may be right that this is people hitting return after they have written their post, possibly because RETURN is also used as ENTER in many applications (but not usually in Forums). I wish that the new convention in IPB 4.0 composition pane did not start a new paragraph and down a space when you hit return. The old way was was just fine --- it exists the current line of text and drops down to the next full line, no space, no "carriage return" (I'm showing my age).

[Ryan Williams]

Is it just with old posts? Because there are post rebuild tasks in the admin area dashboard that need to run. I had lots of formatting issues with old posts until those tasks completed.

[JWSOUNDGROUP]

For me this has been a problem only for new posts since updating to IPB 4.0. As stated before, I believe this is happening because the post editor handles RETURN differently than previous 3.0x versions. Pressing RETURN used to just put the cursor on the line below a completed line but now pressing return skips a line as if to start a new paragraph. I preferred the old way where if I wanted a blank line signaling a new paragraph I would just hit return twice. I believe that my members may be hitting return several times before finding the Submit button, thereby inserted several blank lines creating white spaces.

[Ahmad E.]

For me this has been a problem only for new posts since updating to IPB 4.0. As stated before, I believe this is happening because the post editor handles RETURN differently than previous 3.0x versions. Pressing RETURN used to just put the cursor on the line below a completed line but now pressing return skips a line as if to start a new paragraph. I preferred the old way where if I wanted a blank line signaling a new paragraph I would just hit return twice. I believe that my members may be hitting return several times before finding the Submit button, thereby inserted several blank lines creating white spaces.

​While I do not recommend this, you can do this:

You should really just let your members that they have to press Shift+Enter for a line break.

[Ryan Williams]

Seems to me like if your members are doing that, the problem is going to exist whether return creates one line or two. The new behaviour is actually more intuitive because it's how word processors such as Word handle paragraphs, not to mention many other web applications, email clients, and CMSs. It shouldn't be difficult for your members to get used to this if given a little time.

On a more technical level, I expect that under the hood IPS Suite 4 uses proper <p></p> tags for single uses of return and <br> for shift+return. If people had to do two line breaks to achieve a paragraph, this would result in really poor HTML which could also have a negative effect on things such as image alignment, custom styling, and more.

I don't consider it a good idea to mess with this default behaviour.