'Rich' Editor feedback.

masonic

Where are you pasting from?
I've written all of this text in notepad.
Then copied and pasted it into the editor in the normal way.
It seems to treat it as one paragraph with single line breaks.

Natty68

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81865642#Comment_81865642

I was pasting from Word… For some reason it doesn't like Word…hmmmm

Jenni_D

Microsoft Office files are notorious for inserting pseudo-HTML formatting into the text when copied into another application/website.

masonic

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81865655#Comment_81865655

I think you may be able to work around this by using the "paste as plain text" right-click option (or Ctrl+Shift+V shortcut). You will lose the bold formatting, but this will be quicker to reapply than restructuring all of the text. Or an intermediate paste into Notepad, which will strip all of the paragraph formatting from Word.

Natty68

Weirdly @masonic I tried to do it via notepad and it worked, and as you say I've just got to bold the bits I need.

Thank you for your help

Midnighter

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81865627#Comment_81865627

Which seems @ss-backwards to me. Surely single line spacing should be the norm, with anything else being an option.

masonic

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81865788#Comment_81865788

It's a modern feature of most text editors, including MS Word and free alternatives, but not that modern as the last forum editor had it too (though it was applied unpredictability after you hit post - causing people to have to go back and edit in extra spacing when it occasionally didn't work). It avoids the "wall of text" effect you get when paragraphs are stacked tightly together. It's seen on most websites today. MS Word 2007 first introduced it to the word processor as the default.

The old-fashioned way of doing it was to indent the first word of each paragraph. This made sense for the old print media where they wanted to pack as much as they can onto each page, but nowadays that just looks wrong. Given that it is just formatting applied independently of the text, you could request a feature in your user settings to turn it off when you are logged in. Users could then choose to see text (like my post) without any spacing between the paragraphs if that was their preference, without affecting the experience of others.

The purpose of configuring the layout independently of the content is that you can have that level of control. If people are forced to manually insert white-space by pressing the Enter key twice between paragraphs, then you'd be unable to achieve that, and you'd have no fine control over the amount of margin added.

As mentioned above, the editor gives you control when you really do need two lines to sit on top of each other, like when inserting an address, a poem, or a list - you can simply use Shift-Enter:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

— "This is just to say" by William Carlos Williams

Also:

• There is
• A list feature
• That is singly spaced between items
• By default

Floss

The "copy & paste from notepad" workaround defeats the whole "quick response" from a mobile though.

If I want to read, quote & reply from my Samsung I have the issues noted by others (quote full post or nothing and extra line spacing). I don't always have the time to open Notepad & create my post in there.

masonic

If I want to read, quote & reply from my Samsung I have the issues noted by others (quote full post or nothing and extra line spacing). I don't always have the time to open Notepad & create my post in there.

I'm typing this from my own Samsung right now. All I had to do was select the bit of text from your post, copy, select "quote" from the format menu, paste, change back to normal formatting and start typing.

I don't think this is harder than the old system of hitting quote, then selecting and cutting out everything you don't want to quote. Which was at times a nightmare when someone had inserted a table or suchlike. Though there is at least one open issue on the RTE feedback board concerning selective quotes.

Notepad is only needed if you are in the habit of composing your replies in MS Word on a desktop or laptop PC.

Midnighter

"It's a modern feature of most text editors, including MS Word and free alternatives, but not that modern as the last forum editor had it too (though it was applied unpredictability after you hit post - causing people to have to go back and edit in extra spacing when it occasionally didn't work). It avoids the "wall of text" effect you get when paragraphs are stacked tightly together. It's seen on most websites today. MS Word 2007 first introduced it to the word processor as the default."

Selectively quoting @masonic, because I don't want to quote everything, but that's not how I recall the previous MSE update. Yes, it had double line spacing when initially launched, but it was very quickly switched back to single line spacing.

This system, shift+enter, is just another way of complicating what was a relatively simple system.