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Spacing Changes In Layouts Templates #3

A new post starts out with wide vertical spacing. Look at what we have here, from line to line. Nice and wide vertical spacing. Clean and easy to read. The perfect look for a blog, right?

Now, let's throw in a quote.


In the past, and looking at my example shown in Spacing Changes In Layouts Templates, you'd start seeing the problem here. My immediately previous article Spacing Changes In Layouts Templates #2 suggested an obnoxiously tedious workaround to this problem, which involved surrounding each indent element, such as
<blockquote> ... </blockquote>
with an extra span set to give

<span style="line-height: 1.2;"><blockquote> ... </blockquote></span>


This was fine - it made my blog posts look neat and tidy again - but it had its drawback. It was a major pain in the ass to use - any of my blog posts, of any length, would include 2, 3, or more formatting elements, which I would have to surround each one.

So today, whilst browsing Blogger Help Group: Something Is Broken, I come across Blockquote problem w/ Minima template, with a better workaround.

Go to the Template | Edit HTML tab. In the CSS (top) section of your template code, find the post section. In this section, under the ".post p" heading, find the line that says: line-height:1.6em. Move this line to the ".post" section.


So, let's see what we have in my template.


.post {
margin:.5em 0 1.5em;
border-bottom:1px dotted $bordercolor;
padding-bottom:1.5em;
}

...

.post p {
margin:0 0 .75em;
line-height:1.6em;
}


and change it to


.post {
margin:.5em 0 1.5em;
border-bottom:1px dotted $bordercolor;
padding-bottom:1.5em;
line-height:1.6em;
}

...

.post p {
margin:0 0 .75em;
}


Move the one line of code, in red. Save, and View Blog.

Simple, but still a workaround.
  • It's one change / template setup in the blog (remember if you change templates, you'll have to repeat this one change). Not one change / page element in each post, for eternity.
  • When installed, you lose spacing differences in indented elements (<blockquote>, <ol>, <ul>).
The blog is neater now, but it's not as readable - see the quoted sections above?. Not as easy to spot, as they used to be, when they used 1.0em spacing.

Let Blogger know that this needs to be fixed properly.

Comments

Alexis said…
Fabulous!! Thank you!!!
G said…
thank you SO much. this was so frustrating.
kate said…
Woot! Thanks! I was going a little nuts for a while there trying to figure out what I was doing wrong, and you've given me a quick and easy fix.
Laura said…
Awesome! Thank you.
Lyn Nuttall said…
Worked fine for me, thanks.

But (probably a naive question) why isn't this part of the default, instead of having us all search around for a fix and then go in & fiddle with it?
Nitecruzr said…
Lyn,

Not naive at all. I have half a dozen open issues, that I keep bringing up with Blogger, and occasionally one gets fixed. I think they just have other priorities.

Thanks for the feedback. YOu can always use the Blogger Wishlist too.
Nancy Walters said…
Well, you've saved my life for the second time! Thanks so much for your help. I sometimes wonder why I even use Blogger--it's so damn frustrating because of so many bugs.
Hafiz said…
thanks for this! when i had the problem, i fiddled around with the post's html a lot but i never realized it was due to the blockquote. :p
Hairy Swede said…
genius. thanks. why hasnt this been taken care of by blogger?
Michele Force said…
For some reason just tonight, out of the blue, my entire blog (over a years worth of posts) switched to a squished up single spacing. I didn't make any global changes, so I don't know how it happened. But my research finally led me to this post and I made the one simple change you mentioned and the whole problem is fixed. I was afraid I was going to have to go into every single post and do a "p" tag which was fixing them one at a time. Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!

...do you happen to know how or why this happened to me in the first place?
Thank you soooooo much!!!

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