I put 20 spaces between those two a’s but in the post they appear next to each other. Is there a way of making the twenty spaces stay intact in the post?
Being a good Doper I checked the FAQs at the top of this forum and I found this post by Arnold:
Unfortunately, Arnold’s post and the page linked to therein is all written in Klingon and I have no idea what any of it means. Can someone please answer the question in English - is there a way to make spaces appear in my posts?
I need to know this because I want to make a post requiring spaces. The post I want to make is of the utmost importance and will probably result in world peace, global prosperity, the coming of the Messiah and the dawn of a new era.
However, it is essential that I am able to put spaces in it or else I won’t be able to make the post.
It depends on what you want to do. If you want to put extra spaces in your text, like I did at the end of that last sentence, then use the following escape sequence:
Everywhere you type it, it will appear as a space that doesn’t collapse. If, however, you want to add spaces so as to make stuff line up, use the
tag, to get a result like this:
North
West East
South
Spaces inside a
tag do not collapse either. I suggest you try out any method you decide on here in this thread before making your pinnacle post, though.
Maybe a quick cheat? Insert as many periods as necessary to make the space you want, but make the color of the periods white. It looks sorta like…this.
The white period trick would only work if your post was the OP or you happened to get lucky and get a white background, anyway. Plus, you can still see them.
On a Mac I think you can simply use the nonbreaking space (option-spacebar). Let’s see.
a________________a
Odd, it seems to be drawing an underscore line
As far as the HTML specification goes, any program which renders HTML (i.e., takes an HTML file and produces the output we all know and love) should never display more than one space in a row. That’s all it says.
Basically HTML is not terribly ‘white space aware’.
ie. You can have lines of text appear on the same line, or on the next line or many lines away.
Unlike some programming languages (eg. COBOL) which requires you to start in column 7 and has rules as to what you can break over lines, HTML is less strict.
So if I had a piece of text in my HTML like this:
Hello world
I am
here today and I will be
there tomorrow.
Your browser will render this as:
Hello world I am here today and I will be there tomorrow.
So multiple spaces are not considered to be part of the text but part of the ‘layout’ or ‘readability’ in raw HTML and your browser removes them.
The method for achieving multiple spaces has been described above.
On my home PC (using Mozilla) and my work PC (using IE) posts alterante between gray and white. Your posts just happened to land in a white slot, where I can faintly make out your periods (if I squint and stand a 45 degree angle to the Tropic of Cancer). I wonder if they would be more obvious if your post happened to kand in a gray slot.
The “obvious” reason is do not put hidden text in your post, as that makes more work for the moderators, who have to read all the text. They have already said don’t post in symbol or other strange fonts. This is the same thing.
Though this seems like the same thing as the spoiler code to me. But the spoiler code tells the mods to look there.