Copyright © 1997-2008 Elizabeth Boston, The Computer Lady

Dear Computer Lady,

 

I have Windows 98 2nd Edition and am TRYING to set up a web site using FrontPage 2002.

 

Is there any way to get this software to acknowledge hard returns as single spaces (it automatically double spaces)? No matter what I try (e.g., format - paragraph - spacing - line spacing - single), it just does its own thing, i.e., double space.

 

Also, when I copy text into FrontPage from Word or directly from e-mail (Internet Explorer/Outlook Express 6.0) which has a lot of single-spaced text separated by double spaces, these double spaces frequently, but inconsistently, end up as triple spaces. How can I prevent this from happening?

 

What I end up having to do is to re-type the copy. I have to believe there's some way around this - or is there? Can you help?

 

Diane

Dear Diane,

 

I'm sorry that I had to cut out about half of your question to fit in the newsletter. I can really relate to your frustration though, I started out trying to design my website at http://askTCL.com using Front Page. I spent hours fighting the same thing you describe in addition to a problem with getting the table to keep the white words in the blue portion of the page and the other text out of the blue border.

 

What I finally did was get a book on web design (I used "Web Site Design Made Easy" by Dennis Gaskill at http://www.boogiejack.com )and learn to write the code myself. It was very easy with the book, and I now write my pages by hand. You couldn't pay me to go back.

 

Using Front page, there is a simple way to fix your specific problem since Front Page will allow you to directly edit the HTML.

 

Look down near the bottom of your Front Page window, you will see three tabs; Normal, HTML and Preview.

 

Click on the HTML tab and you will see the HTML (HyperText Markup Language) code for your web page. Now, find the text you want to fix. I find this is easier if I first go to the "Normal" tab, and highlight the text. It is then highlighted in the "HTML" as well.

 

When you find the text, you will need to clean it up. Here is what you need to know. If you want a single line break, you insert the letters br inside brackets like this: <BR>

 

When you want a double space, you would use a P in place of the BR. Like this: <P>

 

If you clean up your text, and only put those tags, your text should look the way you want it to.

 

Elizabeth