XarJ Blog and Podcast

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.

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17 Responses to “How to Add Extra Line Breaks in Wordpress Post”

• Seb Says:
  April 21st, 2008 at 11:50 am

  It finally works! WAHOOOOOO Thanks man!

• Spartan Saving Says:
  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!

• Carol Says:
  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!

• Xarj Says:
  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 < !!!

• Gary Olson Says:
  May 31st, 2008 at 11:44 am

  Great Job Here…I enjoyed it..! Gary

• Glenn Silloway Says:
  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)

• theBlaine.com Says:
  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.

• Xarj Says:
  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…

• Gene Says:
  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.

• karenm Says:
  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.

• Xarj Says:
  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 < !!!

• theBlaine Says:
  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.

• theBlaine Says:
  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.

• Xarj Says:
  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.

  The recent release of WordPress 2.6 has fixed the disappearing entities bug this plugin was designed to fix, so once you upgrade to WordPress 2.6 please discontinue using this plugin.

• theBlaine Says:
  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.

• Anthony Teegarden Says:
  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?!

• ATAD #20 - Adding a linebreak in a wordpress post « A Tip A Day [:: ATAD ::] Says:
  August 19th, 2008 at 8:37 am

  [...] [ via xarj [...]

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