I’ve had a few clients ask me this question, so I’m posting the answer here - because it wasn’t super easy to find on the internet. When you get to the end of a line and hit “return” on your keyboard - what do you want to happen? Sometimes you want a new paragraph. Sometimes you might just want a line break. This short tutorial shows you how to accomplish this. It works for WebYep and WordPress…and probably for many other text editors that might use TinyMCE or FCKEditor or others.

In HTML, there are paragraph tags: <p>I’m a paragraph</p> and there are line breaks <br />.

Paragraph tags make things look like this:

Paragraph 1

Paragraph 2

There’s a line of space between paragraphs.

But line breaks look like this:

Line break 1
Line break 2

There is no line of space.

How do you get what you want when you’re using WebYep or WordPress or some other application that uses a WYSIWYG text editor?

The answer is easy: If you want a new paragraph, simply hit “return“. If you don’t want a new paragraph and just want a line break, hit “shift return“.

Now, when I was researching this solution, I did find many folks who said you could accomplish this by changing a few lines of code in the TinyMCE initiation file. And this did work…but only on Internet Explorer. It didn’t work on Firefox. So I think the simple “shift return” solution is the best one for my clients to use.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 10:16 am and is filed under the WebYep, WordPress category. Read other Aldebaran Website Design Blog articles by returning to main blog page. Need a blog added to your website? Click here to read about blog installation services or click here to contact Aldebaran Web Design.