Wikidot Community

There is no simple answer.

Changing the wiki syntax is a low priority: it can happen, but not immediately.

Try either of these workarounds:

[[div style="text-indent:20px"]]
Your indented paragraph here.
[[/div]]

Or

##white|___##Your indented paragraph here.

___Your indented paragraph here.

Using CSS templates seems like a lot of work for something that is very easy to do either in your custom theme or in a div on your page.

1) CSS:

Just add the following to your custom CSS:

p {
    text-indent:25px;
}

This will indent the text for all paragraphs throughout your site.

2) Div:

If you only want it on selected paragraphs and therefore have more flexibility, use a div like this:

[[div style="text-indent: 25px;"]]
Donec viverra nibh sed.. .. etc
[[/div]]

which gives you:

Rob

Using CSS to redefine paragraphs is not a valid option for me, because I will type lists without the * or + syntax in front of them and it indents all those as well. Using div's around every paragraph is not an option either because one, I'm lazy, and two… it's a lot of typing for little benefit. That's why I would love to have ^ as simple syntax for indenting paragraphs.

Using div's around every paragraph is not an option either because one, I'm lazy, and two… it's a lot of typing for little benefit.

You put the div round the whole text, not each paragraph. It's 2 lines only that you've got to type!

Rob

Personally I think "lazy" is a pretty good argument. Here's something that could be fun, do it once in the CSS and then it works automatically.

From http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/indent

p {
    margin-bottom: 0 
}
p + p {
    text-indent: 1.5em;
    margin-top: 0 
}

I have pages where I mix paragraphs with lists without bullets or simple numbering and it's easier to just selectively pick which paragraphs to indent. I ended up re-defining h1 header and am using +* to indent paragraphs. It's not one character, but it's better than typing divs around everything.

Have to use the * to prevent the header from showing up in the TOC, unless there's another way to use CSS to prevent that. In the end, this workaround works, but it's messy and causes problems with TOC's… so I'd still like ^ added as an indent syntax.

Edit - I would have to have 21 paragraphs on a single page before the number of keystrokes before the +* solutions equals the [[div…. solution. =)

Come to think of it, if you don't use block quotes, you could redefine that style to do what you want with a simple leading "> ". Or you could hijack the style used for notes, but that syntax requires wrapping in "[[note]]...[[/note]]".

BTW, even if I used the [[div]] method, I would do it using "class=NAME" rather than a raw style, and define the style in CSS. Much more configurable if you decide to change the appearance a bit later.

And while I'm at it, I wish [[span]] took a class= attribute….

Come to think of it, if you don't use block quotes, you could redefine that style to do what you want with a simple leading "> ". Or you could hijack the style used for notes, but that syntax requires wrapping in "[[note]]…[[/note]]".

You're a genius! You set the challenge, and I accept:

blockquote {
    margin: 0;
    border: none;
    padding: 0;
    background-color: transparent;
}
blockquote p {
    margin: 0;
    text-indent: 3em;
}
blockquote p + p {
    margin: 1em 0 0;
}

So that will turn blockquotes into normal text but with indents. So this code:

> Kynan is awesome!

@ Pieter

p + p {

OMG! I had no idea you could do that in CSS! This opens a whole world of possibilities! Is it compatible with all browsers? Do you have a link to some documentation on the subject? I tried Googling “add html elements in css”, but that rendered silly results.

And while I'm at it, I wish [[span]] took a class= attribute…

Umm, it does. [[span class="name"]]

Is it compatible with all browsers?

Yes, although not IE6 and below.

Do you have a link to some documentation on the subject? I tried Googling “add html elements in css”, but that rendered silly results.

Just do a google search for adjacent sibling selector for that is what it is called.

Rob

James,

I found this site to be really useful, especially the section on CSS Selectors:
http://css.maxdesign.com.au/selectutorial/

-Ed

I tried using a class= with [[span]] once (a long time ago) and it didn't work. And since it wasn't documented in the help, I thought it hadn't changed. I tried it though, and yup, it works now. So either I did something wrong a long time ago, or it got silently added. In any case, great!