How to Indent a Line, or Insert TAB character?

  • Resolved dds

    (@dixonds)


    6 months, 3 weeks ago

    Hi. In a paragraph block, I’d like to indent the second and fourth lines in four-line stanzas of a poem. I could not find any way to insert a TAB character, so I just put seven spaces to indent the lines. This looks fine on the editing screen, but in the live view, the spaces are stripped away and the lines are not indented.

    One of the forum posts said 5 consecutive spaces sometimes might work, but no. I can’t find TAB in the ASCII HTML tables, so I thought maybe some non-breaking spaces would not get stripped away, but the only article I could find on extended characters, “Use Character Entities” only shows how to put them in tags or whatever, and I couldn’t even understand how exactly to even do that.

    How does one place an extended character in one’s paragraph block text, step-by-step, please?

    Thanks.

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Moderator Samuel Wood (Otto)

    (@otto42)

    www.ads-software.com Admin

    HTML ignores white space. You have to specify what you want it to do via CSS. Examples: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/white-space

    Thread Starter dds

    (@dixonds)

    The question is not about how to handle whitespace, it is about how to insert the standard ASCII Special Characters like En Dash, Nonbreaking Hyphen, Nonbreaking Space . . . etc. into the text. According to the article “Using Character Entities in WordPress”, HTML calls them Character Entities or Extended Characters. How does the WordPress Site Editor provide for inserting these characters into our text?

    Thanks.

    Thread Starter dds

    (@dixonds)

    I found a way with Microsoft ALT codes that works for the website. I will try to demonstrate here in the forum. Even if the special characters show up in this editor, they may not show in the submitted post. That’s what happens on the website — the indents show in the Editor but not on the live page. Proper indentation is very important.

    ???????By entering ALT 0160 Non-Breaking Space seven times in a row, I can indent this line.??It shows in the Editor.??If I enter ALT 21, I get this character: §.??ALT 0137 makes ‰, ALT 0134 makes ?.??With ALT 138 and ALT 130, you can even spell resume like rèsumé!??Even though the ALT 09 Horizontal Tab does not show on the live page, I will enter it here to see if it shows in forum posts.??It does not. But the nonbreaking spaces will work for indenting.??And you can use two Non-Breaking Spaces after periods so HTML won’t cram your sentences together.

    You don’t need the Rich Text Keyboard Input feature to enter the ALT codes, but if you use it, the special characters display in a different style than the ones without it. Can’t demonstrate that here though; it’s not in the drop-down,

    To enter Microsoft ALT codes, you press and hold the left ALT key, enter the decimal code on the numeric keypad, release the left ALT key. All you need is to find a table of the numeric codes and if necessary convert the Hex values to decimal. There is a nuance, however. There are two different bases for the key codes. Codes with a leading zero like ALT 0160 yield a different character than codes without a leading zero. So ALT 0160 is Non-Breaking Space, but ALT 160 is á. The base with the leading zeros contains the control characters.

    The best ALT codes table I found is at altcodeunicode.com.

    • This reply was modified 6 months, 3 weeks ago by dds.
    • This reply was modified 6 months, 3 weeks ago by dds.
Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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