NationStates

When you're making a dispatch, you can't have more than one space between, well, anything. Try it: Put 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 or more spaces between a word or a letter, and then you click preview, and it's one space. The only solution I see so far is tabs which you don't know how far they'll go.

My idea is to allow the spaces on a dispatch to have multiple spaces in between. Your thoughts on this?

You mean like this?

Just use the [tab] tags.

Valrifell wrote:You mean like this?

Just use the [tab] tags.

I know, but it's sometimes hard to know what number will equal what, a newer player may think a the "[tab=15]" makes the entire board blank. Allowing multiple spaces seems easier, no?

You can also do it, by inserting some characters and making them the same color as the background. But this trick only works on the light theme. On the dark theme, it'll stand out like night and day.

--------*your text here*

Code: Select all

[background=#ffffff][color=#ffffff]--------[/color][color=#000000]*your text here*[/color][/background]

Estado Novo Portugues wrote:You can also do it, by inserting some characters and making them the same color as the background. But this trick only works on the light theme. On the dark theme, it'll stand out like night and day.

--------*your text here*

Code: Select all

[background=#ffffff][color=#ffffff]--------[/color][color=#000000]*your text here*[/color][/background]

I know, but it takes more effort than just allowing multiple spaces.

I think it's mainly intended to prevent weird spacing when people press space twice by mistake (or out of habit -- people used to do that on typewriters). The workarounds seem enough for the rare cases when you actually need more than one space.

La xinga wrote:When you're making a dispatch, you can't have more than one space between, well, anything. Try it: Put 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 or more spaces between a word or a letter, and then you click preview, and it's one space.

HTML is like that normally. It's to allow people to format their source code more readably by allowing more freedom in how to organize the code (this is less useful with BBcode, where lines breaks are still parsed individually even if spaces aren't). To avoid it, you need to either use special CSS ("white-space:pre-wrap") or type a non-breaking space, the latter being the easier way on a site that isn't designed for it. Non-breaking spaces can be hard to find, but your computer probably has a "character selector" utility somewhere (you might be familiar with using it for weird accented letters), so look for character U+A0 and copy+paste it. Or here's one: " ". Huh, looks like the forum doesn't like non-breaking spaces and automatically converts them to normal spaces. Makes some sense (people are prone to typing these things by accident and not realizing it), but inconvenient right now. I guess you'd have to test if they work gameside.

I just use the "em" space (Unicode U+2003)
Like     this. (5 "em" spaces)

Or the shorter variant, the "three-per-em" space. (Unicode U+2004)
Like     this. (5 "three-per-em" spaces)


You can copy it and use it in your own posts (or dispatches).


PS: Name checks out.

I think more people would be more annoyed by having unintentional extra spaces in their dispatch the they would like to be able to save on a little formatting.