Double spaces

There was an error in my thinking on this plugin. If an entry had two or more consecutive spaces, all spaces in the entry would be replaced by non-breaking spaces.

I’ve now fixed it so that all instances of two spaces will be replaced by a space followed by a non-breaking space.

That should work all the time without inserting unnecessary non-breaking spaces.

and the same can be said for Radioland’s fabulous Radioland blogging software. In fact, often I have a wish for a feature and before I can even voice my desire, it’s implemented. Fixes and new features are release almost every day. Bugs do exist (the ever present paragraph bug), but they are ones that are difficult to fix and we have to be patient, because it takes time to fix them (how much griping would you tolerate if you sold a tool like this for $39. These people are amazingly tolerant of us newbies.) Amazingly, they just keep improving it anyway. Radioland: http://radio.userland.com

Tres cool — except that a double-space created by the plug-in can be can be broken across lines, so that you can have a spurious space show up on the next line. Not sure how you’d get around that, but it was a nice try.

Well, yes, but that’s a limitation of HTML. Multiple instances of whitespace are condensed down to a single instance when the code is rendered. The only way to have two or more spaces in a row is to use a non-breaking space. Add to that the fact that there’s no real way to specify the line length (or even to figure out where on the line a character is), and you can see the problem isn’t really solvable.

If you want perfect control over your typography, you shouldn’t be using HTML. Try PDF instead.

By the way, I disagree with the two spaces thing. There should be a single space after a period. Period. I just built the plugin because Scott asked.

Hey there.

I was wondering if this plugin can be modified to give me a double return when only one is hit.

I am trying to accomplish a first line indent for each paragraph in my entries, but the text that I am posting is all completed with just one carriage return, so MT does nothing with it.

Here is my thread on MT’s forum:

http://www.movabletype.org/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi?s=3e825f083052ffff;act=ST;f=14;t=17277

Thanks in advance for any input you can give.

Plugins only work with the data that comes out of MT. There’s no way for them to affect the data going into it.

If all you want is for 5 spaces to follow every <br> tag, you could modify Double Spaces to do that for you.

Just change the line that reads: $string =~ s| | &nbsp;|g;

to read $string =~ s|(<br\s+?/?>)|$1&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;|g;

The HTML it generates isn’t going to win any awards for semantic markup, but it will display correctly in the browser.

Hey adam.

Thanks a bunch for that. I edited it, and changed the name to DoubleReturn, and left all your information intact.

It works just like I wanted it to. Much thanks again!

Excerpt: Seems I'm not the only one griping about not having double spaces between sentences. Thank god someone did something about it... I'm giving it a test run....

Excerpt: Philiosophy As a discourse between myself and the wider world, the golden path is an unorganized accumulation of hopes, the embodiment of wish. Design notes can be found in the archives of this site itself, but include: February 12, 2003...

The way to fix what Dave is talking about is to have the two spaces converted to a nonbreaking space followed by a regular space. Currently you have them reversed, it seems.

Adam, I thank you for making such a useful MT plugin. However, I’d like to suggest that you format your double spaces with “&nbsp; ” instead of ” &nbsp;” because the latter syntax you use seems to put an occasional extra space at the front of some wrapped lines in certain paragraphs. Namely, if a sentence ends right where the line wraps, then the non-breaking space gets added to the following line. I’ve found that for left-aligned text, if you put the non-breaking space right next to the word, most browsers interpret it as part of the word and as a result, won’t add it to the beginning of the next line.

$string =~ s|  |&nbsp; |g;

Thanks again for the script.

What Brad there says is quite useful for left aligned text as he says… however would be problematic for right aligned (it’d end up with basically the same problem we have now, but the superfluous space would be at the end of a sentance). So hows about an attribute saying you want it formatted for right aligned text (with left aligned being default).