Xaprb

I’m using Google Docs for a project I’m working on right now, and I ran into a problem with spacing. There appears to be no way to get spacing between paragraphs. You can control spacing between lines, but that’s not the same thing. Actually, it’s quite easy. You just have to know how Google Docs works.

The root problem is that it’s not creating paragraphs when you press the [Enter] key. It’s just adding a <br> tag. If you get it to create paragraphs, you can edit the document’s CSS and fix the problem easily.

The trick to this is to explicitly format the text with the Normal Paragraph Text style. This is not the same as no formatting. The easiest way to do this is to press Ctrl+0 while your cursor is in the paragraph you want to format. After you do this, pressing [Enter] will actually do what you want — it will create a new paragraph.

Now that you’ve done that, you can add the following CSS with the Edit/Edit CSS menu:

p {
  margin: 1em 0 1em 0;
}

You should now see the desired spacing between paragraphs.

I really like Dokuwiki. I remember looking at it many years ago (even then, there were way too many wikis) but for some reason my company or project at the time didn’t choose it. Maybe this was the company that decided Sharepoint was better, I don’t remember. (They never did understand why a collection of Word documents was inferior to a wiki.)

I’ve been using it for a while now, and of all the wikis I’ve used, which are quite a few, it is easily the nicest. It has such nice conventions — once you learn what they are, and use them to your advantage, everything gets so easy. Example: being able to name pages with [[brackets in the flow of text]]. And there are many more things; I don’t want to start any heated debates about it, but in my opinion, it hits exactly the right balance between simplicity and power.

A while ago I switched my theme to Journalist (link at the very bottom of the page) because I thought it was well laid out and solidly designed -- I mean it uses sensible CSS and XHTML etc. The only thing I didn't care for was that it was a little too minimal, if anything. There are lots of themes out there that look gorgeous, but when I tested them they don't render right.

So I have made a hybrid. Just a few edits to CSS and borrowing a few images from the deLight theme later, and now I have something that pleases me visually too.

And in the process I wouldn't be surprised if I've broken something for Windows IE users or what have you. But I'm sure someone will let me know.

For future reference, I'm attaching an image of what it looks like.

Theme preview