Need Help! Paragraph formatting problem

P

photogman

I have worked over two days with a paragraph formatting problem and I
can't come up with a solution. I'm working with a document in word
that has 3 or 4 levels of indentation similar to an outline. I found
out quick enough that Frontpage2002 doesn't have a tabs command. So I
tried moving the lines in with Format/Paragraph/Indentation/Before
Text menu. That didn't work because in my case the lines were single-
spaced and everytime I attempted to move a line in, Frontpage would
move in this example, all 4 lines in, where I just wanted to move in
one. It would have worked but there were no forced paragraph marks
between lines. I tried to type this all in manually in Frontpage but
that didn't work either because if I entered after each line, it would
produce a linefeed and it would appear double-spaced or 1.5 spaced.
If I pushed shift enter to only single-space, Frontpage would treat it
all as a paragraph and move every line in when I used the Format/
Paragraph/Indentation/Before Text menu.

I have to line all my tabs/indentions up throughout the document. If
there was a manual paragraph mark that I could put at the end of each
line and retain my single-spacing, then I could type the document
right in Frontpage and move over the lines one by one, but it won't
allow me to. I"m a complete loss to figure a solution out. I would
be very, very grateful for some help to figure this one out!!

This is what I'm trying to do:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.


Instead I get this:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
 
M

Mark Fitzpatrick

Unfortunately, this is one of the issues with how the web works. There is no
WYSIWYG editor for the web that is able to do this sort of activity.

You can, however, do this with CSS. I won't say this will work the same
across all browsers, but we can try :)

You can do this two ways, the first, you can simply set a style for all of
your paragraphs. The style code will go in the header of your page (between
the <head> tags somewhere)

<style type="text/css"><!--
p { text-indent: -4 em; margin-left: 4em;}
-->
</style>

the text-indent attribute tells the first line how far to move inward. In
this case, we're using a negative number which will make it hang outward.
The margin-left tells how far to shove the whole thing inward. So basically
what we're doing is shoving the whole paragraph in, then pulling the top
line back out.

This will be applied equally to every paragraph element in the page.

If you want to use it on just some, you could define a different style, a
named class that you could then apply selectively such as:

<style type="text/css"><!--
..indent { text-indent: -4 em; margin-left: 4em;}
-->
</style>

Then, any paragraph you want can use the indent class like so <p
class="indent"> to say that this paragraph needs to be indented. You could
do this for any element, for example a hyperlink <a> as in <a
class="indent">


--
Hope this helps,
Mark Fitzpatrick
Former Microsoft FrontPage MVP 199?-2006
 

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