Paragraph breaks produce large gaps

Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
aa
Nov 14, 2009
4,694
2,579
This has been bugging me ever since we migrated to the new site. Typically on a forum, people use a pair of line breaks,

like this, to indicate a break between paragraphs, because there's no way to insert a </p><p>. But on this site, line breaks create a little extra space between lines. So we get these extra-large gaps that look very unnatural. Making this doubly frustrating is the fact that those extra gaps don't appear in the text box we type our posts into, even though other formatting is visible. This should be an easy CSS fix; could we please get it?
 

Geit

&#128156; I probably broke it &#128156;
aa
May 28, 2009
598
1,161
The reason it's like this is because because without the extra margin single line breaks are indistinguishable from long lines of wrapped text. Not everyone does do the double line break to represent a paragraph, and that makes some posts nearly unreadable.

i.e. (styling, no extra margin on breaks):

NX7SHl.png
current (old):

5hB0I8.png

I've added an additional selector for contiguous breaks to lower the margin a bit, so this is what it looks like now:

lgyok0.png
 
Last edited:

Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
aa
Nov 14, 2009
4,694
2,579
Who doesn't do double line breaks? I don't remember ever seeing anyone who didn't do that, and if they did, the solution is to tell them the right way to do it rather than make everyone else do it the wrong way.
 

Idolon

they/them
aa
Feb 7, 2008
2,105
6,106
Single line breaks are nice
you don't have to hit enter twice
it's good for a list
it will be missed
but that is just my advice

Writing poetry isn't exactly a common occurrence here, but my point is that sometimes you want a shorter single line break. I think we can trust our users to format stuff nicely, and the option is there for people who want it.
 

UKCS-Alias

Mann vs Machine... or... Mapper vs Meta?
aa
Sep 8, 2008
1,264
816
Double line breaks are silly in a lot of word-processing tools. The world isn't running in notepad.
linebreaks.png

(yes, thats an image ilustrating a line break distance of just 3 pixels, which is extremely clear to notice yet barely hurts even if it would be a double line)