April 18th, 2008How to Add Extra Line Breaks in WordPress Post 
How to add extra line breaks and spaces in your WordPress Posts
You are writing a new post in wordpress and are desperately trying to add multiple line breaks and spaces to make your post look nicer and easier to read?
You tried adding manual line breaks with the <br /> tag but wordpress visual editor automatically deletes them? You might have tried to create those extra spaces by using a point or dot between your paragraphs but it doesn’t look very professional. So how the hell can you have multiple line breaks in your posts?
To add an extra line break use this code :
<p align="left"> </p>
Go to the Code tab in your wordpress post and paste the code anywhere you want an additional line space. As a reminder, the tag simply means a white empty space.
Note : Do not remove the align=”left” otherwise WordPress visual editor will delete the whole tag!
Voila! Hope this will do the trick! Leave your feedback.
I found this code : <br clear="none" /> on a website. Anyone has tried it to get extra line breaks?
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April 21st, 2008 at 11:50 am
It finally works! WAHOOOOOO Thanks man!
May 1st, 2008 at 8:04 am
Thank you so much, I’ve been trying and and have not been able to figure it out. Thanks a lot!
May 9th, 2008 at 10:44 pm
Well, it works once, but if I go back to edit the post, it deletes this code and I get no spaces again!
May 10th, 2008 at 10:49 am
Hey Carol!
I’ve had the same problem too! This is soooo annoying! And wordpress wysiwyg editor also removes the empty tag & nbsp; code which I thought was needed to keep the extra line space tag. That wysiwyg editor really affects and modifies your code in all sorts of ways!
One could try to use a white dot (if your background is white) to keep the extra line spacing:
< span style="color: #ffffff;">.< /span>
or
< p align="left">< span style="color: #ffffff;">.< /span>< /p>
Another problem I’ve got since I installed WP 2.5 is the centering tags which do not center my text and images anymore. A lot of my posts align to the left now instead of center! That sucks! The new method of centering is :
< p style="text-align: center;">Your Text or Image< /p>
NOTE :: Be careful with the code above! I had to add a space after all the < otherwise the code would not appear! If you use the codes above make sure you remove the extra spaces after all the < !!!
May 31st, 2008 at 11:44 am
Great Job Here…I enjoyed it..! Gary
June 13th, 2008 at 8:57 pm
thanks, man. even with the delete-on-edit problem it has ended my frustration (now, if I can just get it right first time)
July 10th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
I have found that an even easier way to do inside the WYSIWYG editor is the hit ENTER to make a new line, then click on the RIGHT ALIGN icon, then just keep hit ENTER for as many lines as you need. When you have as many lines as you need, just unclick the RIGHT ALIGN icon and then you can start typing again. It will retain the extra lines when you switch back and forth between WYSIWYG and the HTML editor. It also keeps the lines after you hit save and go back in to edit. I use WP 2.5.1. This is almost the exact same procedure as described above, except it doesn’t require you to actually type out any HTML code. I hope this helps.
July 11th, 2008 at 11:37 am
@theBlaine
I just tried your technique and it seems to work!
You could also click the align left or center, the result is the same. It will create this code :
< p style="text-align: left;">< /p>
It will use the style css tag instead of the align tag. I don’t know which is better to create a line break. Probably the same…
July 14th, 2008 at 4:28 pm
At last, after all my unanswered question at WP forum. I found the answer now. Thank you so much for sharing this info.
July 19th, 2008 at 4:17 am
Well, this is a simple enough workaround, but something that won’t work for me.
Does anyone know how to keep WP from stripping br/ tags?
I’m going nuts.
July 19th, 2008 at 9:30 am
@Karenm
The br / tags will get erased every time if you use the WYSIWYG editor but I think you’d be ok if you always disable the wysiwyg editor in your user settings (Visual Editor).
Why can’t you use the
< p style="text-align: left;">< /p>
or
< p align="left"> < /p>
? There’s no reason you can’t use those!
NOTE :: Be careful with the code above! I had to add a space after all the < otherwise the code would not appear! If you use the codes above make sure you remove the extra spaces after all the < !!!
July 20th, 2008 at 6:43 pm
This might be of some use. I also use this plugin and it helps. I had to really play around with different settings and learned that some code I can interchange between Visual and HTML, but some code I always have to keep in the HTML. Here is that plugin:
http://englishmike.net/other-plugins/tinymceentities-plugin/
Not sure if it will help you or not. I’m only about 3 weeks into using/learning WordPress, but I’m always trying to hunt down ways to make this easier coming from someone who codes mostly in a text editor. But I do prefer the ease of WP.
July 20th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
Xarj,
Switching to Visual seems to strip out that empty tag. Try putting a non-breaking space like this:
< p align="left"> < /p>
It should keep that line when you go into Visual. I’m using WP 2.6 with Firefox 3.0.1.
July 22nd, 2008 at 8:15 am
@theBlaine
Thanks for the “TinyMCE Entities Patch Plugin” plugin. I didn’t know such a plugin for wordpress existed!
But only use it with WordPress 2.5.1 and older versions. The problem has been fixed in WP 2.6.
July 24th, 2008 at 1:17 am
Thanks for bringing that to my attention, I recently upgraded to 2.6, but still had the Plugin activated. Thanks for the heads up.
August 15th, 2008 at 4:48 am
What I don’t understand is why does wp not give the ability to do line breaks? Something so simple and so necessary can’t just be put in?? I mean why all the hoops to jump through lol?!
I’m not able to get the code to work on mine posts still? Help?!
September 30th, 2008 at 1:52 am
NONE of the above has worked for me.
Sure enough using the right align and enter inserts the code but this is just totally ignored.
I am at my wits end and seriously thinking about dumping wordpress and taking a look at joomla or something.
this lack of ability to insert a line break is such an incredible oversight and to be so totally inconsistant.
I keep looking over my shoulder thinking I’m on candid camera or something….
Regards
Mick Gray
October 7th, 2008 at 6:00 am
love u man!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
thanks a lot!!!!!!
October 14th, 2008 at 6:12 am
Well, for me it works when I add (at HTML mode) the line
This one
doesn’t work, the editor remove the for some reason…
Also need to verify that in the css tag is not defined with 0 margins
Tahks for the post, now I can edit my entries the way I really want them to be !
October 17th, 2008 at 4:45 am
Thanks mate! Much appreciated for this workaround.
November 14th, 2008 at 7:44 am
Thank you man, it’s good job.
December 1st, 2008 at 7:47 am
Thanks a lot.
Been trying to figure it out.
FM
December 5th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
This method doesn’t work with wordpress 2.6.5.
The editor remove them.
If there any another solution except the white little point ?
December 18th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
I found that the WordPress wysiwyg editor inserted paragraph spaces correctly when I added some padding to the bottom of my tag for that section of my page. for example, i added “p {margin-bottom:1.2em;}” to that section of my style sheet, and it worked fine!
March 27th, 2009 at 8:12 pm
I’m so tired of trying this code and that just to put a blasted extra line in a post. I decided to just do the simple inserting of a dot and changing it to my background color. Worked like a champ. One day when I’m not so sick of inserting coding only to have it altered or deleted when I hit a button, I’ll try the codes. Thanks a bunch!!!
April 30th, 2009 at 2:20 am
Enabling Line Break “” in WordPress is now possible without hacking WP source code. Finally!! a permanent solution with TinyMCE Advanced plugin. You can donwload it here : http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tinymce-advanced/
Very Useful, for sure !!!!
May 2nd, 2009 at 8:01 am
Hi Sebyrar!
So you need to replace the default wordpress TinyMCE with this version? And how do you add extra line breaks in that new version? There’s a specific option for this? Tell us more!
August 27th, 2009 at 5:56 am
Thanks for this!
It works well in WP 2.8.
October 22nd, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Thanks a lot. I have this site for Lego with lots of pictures. The line break has always been a problem. You just safe me. Thanks again.
December 14th, 2009 at 9:44 am
[...] How to Add Extra Line Breaks in WordPress [...]
December 23rd, 2009 at 5:42 am
I have used this tag successfully but find it will only give you one line break regardless of how many times you include it. This: has worked much better for me.
December 23rd, 2009 at 5:43 am
Sorry – your comment function erased my tag.
December 28th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
Thank you!!
without the space before br worked perfectly for me after many months of searching for a solution.
My world now includes as many empty lines as I like! LOL
January 30th, 2010 at 1:17 am
Thanks man!This helps me.
March 5th, 2010 at 12:53 am
I still can’t get it to work :s
April 21st, 2010 at 5:00 pm
doesn’t work…. TinyMCE Advanced doesn’t work. I’m losing my mind over a damn line break!
May 29th, 2010 at 8:35 pm
Finally, a solution that worked for me. Thanks for the help.
June 19th, 2010 at 5:31 pm
None of these worked for me. Have used various codes for linebreaks for the past 2 years with no problems… this new version of WP strips out EVERYTHING I throw at it. WTF WordPress????
July 1st, 2010 at 9:31 am
This is working, however contrary it will not working when you switching the tab “Visual” & “HTML”, you can see the code will disappear.
July 16th, 2010 at 8:30 pm
I recently started up my first blog running on WP 3.0. I’m having a hell of a time getting line breaks to play nice with me now.
I’m starting to hit the point where I agree that WordPress needs to have a 1-click option in the kitchen sink that inserts a blank line.
July 30th, 2010 at 12:47 am
You are brilliant. Thank you so much for this elegant and simple solution.
August 15th, 2010 at 10:39 pm
“I found that the WordPress wysiwyg editor inserted paragraph spaces correctly when I added some padding to the bottom of my tag for that section of my page. for example, i added “p {margin-bottom:1.2em;}” to that section of my style sheet, and it worked fine!”
for a newbie. . where would i find the style sheet to add this text?