It isn’t a great advertisement for a writer and editor when their own blog looks mal-formatted, but bugger me backwards if I can get paragraph breaks where I want them. 
In certain posts, they simply won’t work. (See my previous post for a fine example.)
This is a relatively new problem which has arisen in the last couple of weeks, and I cannot find a way around it. Some paragraphs work OK, and others don’t. I have used HTML, tried hitting the “Enter” key ten times, but no, if WordPress doesn’t want to leave a line between two paragraphs, then there really doesn’t seem to be much you can do about it.
This post is another example. There should be a break before “This is a ….”. WordPress doesn’t agree. 
Edit: Thanks to Gabriel’s tip (see comments for this post), there is now a paragraph break where I wanted it. So there, WordPress. Yah, boo, sucks. 
Now Susie,I’m having a bit of trouble translating….
bugger me backwards …..
any thoughts?
Kylee x
By: Lunes on March 11, 2008
at 5:50 pm
Kylee – which language do you want to translate it into? Have you tried Google translate, or Reverso?
Google, English into German: Leck mich am Arsch mich rückwärts.
Reverso, English to French: Sodomisez-moi en arrière.
Another way of putting it: WTF?
By: merewoman on March 11, 2008
at 8:04 pm
One of the easiest methods to guarantee a space between paragraphs is to drop a character in between, but make it the same colour as your theme… to see what I mean just surf over to my place and do a “select all” and you’ll see ‘invisible’ characters where I needed an extra space. You can even change the spacing by changing the font size of the ‘invisible’ character.
This is the basic HTML I’ve been using and I’ve never had a problem with paragraph spacing:
?p align=”left”! ?font color=”#ffffff (white)” face=”Times New Roman” size=”1″!insert text here?/font!?/p!
Just change the ! for ‘>’ and the ? for ‘<’ then choose whatever colour, font and size you like and I’m pretty sure you’ll be fine…
By: Gabriel... on March 11, 2008
at 9:38 pm
Hi Gabriel, and thanks very much for that suggestion. I see from the WordPress forum that it’s a very common problem and is affecting many bloggers.
Your solution is so obvious and so simple, I should have been able to work it out for myself.
Cheers.
Susie
Later: That worked, thank you, Gabriel. Still, it would be nice to just be able to hit the “enter” key instead of having to put in all the code.
By: merewoman on March 11, 2008
at 10:01 pm
The easiest thing to do is copy and paste the HTML wherever it’s needed. I write my text into the Write Post box then add the HTML from the last post around it… this way I know it’ll work and because I use the same format of >Top Photo; YouTube; Quote; Post; End Photo< I already have a basic template for each post.
I totally started doing this by accident when I started Salted, until I saw people in the Forum were having problems I thought this was the way you were supposed to do it… I also hated the default font for my Theme, but liked the Theme so with the HTML it’s easy to reset the Font attributes.
Glad I could help…
By: Gabriel... on March 11, 2008
at 10:47 pm
Oh wow. I was having the same problem too.. the paragraph spacing frustrates me a lot!!
Thanks Gabriel for sharing the wonderful tip
now it works just fine.
By: Melissa on March 22, 2008
at 1:41 pm
Hi… just be aware that if you’re making the little spaces white to match your white theme and you change to a black theme you’ll have little white dots, so you might have to go back and change the colour… it’s actually a fairly easy process (copy, paste) but also dull and boring. It’s better if there’s a bottle of wine involved.
By: Gabriel... on March 24, 2008
at 9:42 pm
This has got to be a theme problem, rather than a WP problem.
The only problem I ever have with paragraph breaks in my blog is if I want to have a TRIPLE (or more) line break between paragrapaphs, thus.
There should be three blank lines above this.
By: Flahute on May 23, 2008
at 7:39 am
This has got to be a theme problem, rather than a WP problem.
The only problem I ever have with paragraph breaks in my blog is if I want to have a TRIPLE (or more) line break between paragrapaphs, thus.
There should be three blank lines above this.
By: Flahute on May 23, 2008
at 7:40 am
You may be right. At least for the moment, the problem seems to have sorted itself out.
But there are only two blank lines in your post, as far as I can see.
By: merewoman on May 23, 2008
at 3:06 pm
The problems seems to be caused by the built-in editor (TinyMCEditor, I believe it’s called). Even if you use the HTML view and hand code your post, switching to the visual or “WYSIWYG” mode strips out the tags from the code.
Avoid this by never using the visual mode, and be sure to edit your Profile, unchecking the “Use visual editor” checkbox.
Or you can try using a different editor, either external, such as Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer (beta), for example, or a plugin editor, such as FCKeditor.
I also found I needed to modify the css for the paragraph tags, adding 5- or 6-pixel top and bottom margins (for posts and for pages). I’m not sure why this was necessary, but it seems to work.
If this problem is ever fixed, it will be simpler to change the style sheet than to go back and edit each post that uses the trick discussed above.
By: Michael on May 23, 2008
at 5:40 pm
Thank you, Michael. If the problem reappears, I’ll follow your kind advice.
By: merewoman on May 23, 2008
at 5:48 pm