There's some simple tricks that can really help you to get your pages to look right. The most common difficulty is getting the spacing between lines or paragraphs correct.

Paragraphs and Line Breaks

When you push the Enter button on your keyboard, Plone assumes that you are starting a new paragraph. If you want to force a single line break, you need to hold down the Shift key, then press Enter. Here's an example:

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I pushed the Enter key between each of those lines. Notice the amount of space between those lines. Now look at the same lines of text, this time using Shift+Enter:

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Shift+Enter

can also be quite useful for positioning text in relation to images.

 

Paragraph Style and <no style>

Highlight some text on your Plone site, and look at the style drop-down menu in the toolbar. If you chose a regular block of text (not a heading or table), you should see the words Normal Paragraph. Normal paragraph, is the standard text style used in Plone. The style gives each line a particular height, and the font a particular size and color. Sometimes, you may encounter lines of text that appear closer together than they do with Normal Paragraph. This is because, somehow or another, the text isn't recognized as being in a paragraph. When this is the case, you'll see the words <no style> in the drop-down menu.

The above paragraph was written with the Normal Paragraph style, but this one has <no style>, and therefore each line is rendered a bit closer together. Usually, you do not want to keep things this way, because your information is harder to read with the lines so close together. Fixing it is easy, though. Simply highlight the offending text and select Normal Paragraph from the style drop-down menu.

 

 

The Apostrophe and Quotation Marks

You wouldn't think that such a benign thing could be so much trouble, but it can be from time to time. Basically, computers have several ways of displaying these characters. For best results you want the ASCII apostrophe and quotation mark which is a straight hash mark, not a stylized curly one. The reason is that not all web browsers know how to render stylized apostrophes and will replace them with strange looking characters such as an upside-down question mark, diamond, or something like that. It's exactly the same situation with quotation marks (which are essentially just a double apostrophe).

Example:

“The other day I went to the store,”   This is using the bad quotation marks

"And I bought 14 apples to make pies."    Here's the what you should use instead

When does this problem arise? Usually when you are copying from a word processor into Plone. Even pasting into Notepad which strips out all formatting won't work. You'll have to either change them by hand, or run a find-and-replace operation to get rid of them. You'll notice that in the Plone editor, all you get are "plain-text" apostrophes and quotation marks, so you can fix them there as well.

How do you stop it from happening again? If you're using MS Word, you should turn off Smart Quotes to force all quotes and apostrophes to render as normal ASCII characters.

For Word97, Word2000, and WordXP

1. Pull down the Tools menu
2. Select AutoCorrect.
3. Select AutoFormat As You Type.
4. Deselect Replace as you type "Straight quotes" with "smart quotes".
5. Select AutoFormat.
6. Deselect Replace "Straight quotes" with "smart quotes".
7. Click OK.