Saturday, March 5, 2011

Line Breaks

For some reason, Blogger has begun to insert huge line breaks between paragraphs. I press Enter once to create a break between paragraphs but Blogger inserts code for two empty lines instead of one between paragraphs. Then I have to remove these extra empty lines manually which is an incredible drag. I'd rather be writing something interesting instead of struggling with these line breaks. It doesn't happen always, though, and I haven't been able to understand Blogger's logic in inserting empty lines between paragraphs.

You'd say it doesn't matter but it does matter to me. I don't like messy looking texts. I always persecute students with demands that all essays should be written in the MLA format: no cover pages, no cutesy fonts, no smiley faces in  the text, no bold type for titles, consistency in the font and letter size, consistent margins, no line breaks between paragraphs, a well-organized bibliography. A messy looking text betrays an incoherence of thinking that informed it.

This is why I'm so annoyed with the lack of control that Blogger offers me over the way the text of my posts looks. 

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Have you tried doing holding down the shift key while you hit enter? I have that problem on Wordpress, too.

Pagan Topologist said...

Mathematical journals have a common format which makes a lot more sense than other fields' formats. I don't know whether the American Mathematical Society standardizes it or not, but it seems to be pretty universal in mathematics. Notably, we put references in [brackets] and only use superscript footnotes on authors' names, generally to acknowledge research support or to acknowledge that the research is part of the author's doctoral dissertation.

J. said...

I used to run into this too--what browser are you using? I found that Blogger and Internet Explorer did not have a Healthy Relationship, and that's when the weirdness would creep in to my Blogger format stuff.

I switched to Google Chrome, and it's probably my favorite browser--Firefox was good, but it slowed my elderly computer down too much. Anyway, once I changed, I didn't have that problem with Blogger any more.

Mattered to me too. Drove me effing crazy. Good luck!

Clarissa said...

Thanks! This whole trouble started for me after I installed Google Chrome. I love Google Chrome otherwise and am not willing to give up on it.

Weird, huh? :-) :-)

Pagan Topologist said...

I use Firefox. I actually prefer Seamonkey, but our departmental sysadmin says it is less secure than Firefox. I still sometimes use it, but not if I have to enter a credit card number or snything else confidential.