I would like to control the size of the white space around the text at the edge of a box, and between paragraphs within the box. The defaults look pretty ugly, with text jammed against the borders and huge spaces between paragraphs.

This thread has a partial solution using CSS -- this will solve your margin problem.

Controlling the paragraph spacing in a similar way may possible -- Larry might know.

Paragraph spacing is harder in SiteSpinner than regular HTML pages since SiteSpinner does not use the <p> paragraph tag. What SS does is rely on you using the ENTER key to insert line breaks to simulate paragraph spacing. What this does is insert an HTML <br> tag into your text which tells the browser it is a line break.

When a <br> tag is used within text, it does not really know how far apart the text must be spaced, so it relies on the current font line-height value to determine this spacing. This way the <br> knows the difference between 12pt font spacing and 24pt font spacing (for example).

If you modify the CSS code Bruce posted in the linked thread above, you can control the line height used by the <br> tag:

<style type="text/css">
.dfltt {
  padding-left:6px; padding-right:6px
}
.dfltt br {
  line-height: 10px;
}
</style>  

Change the 10px value to the height you want. You can also specify the height in pixels (eg, 10px), points (eg, 10pt) or printer ems (eg, 1.5em).

Be aware that these style changes will not be reflected on the work page, but will be visible when you preview/publish.

Personally, I find altering the <br> line-height could introduce problems as it will set ALL the <br> tags in the text object to the same value. If you need only some spacing differences, this will not work. I have found it better to break my text objects single paragraphs. This allows me to control spacing between text objects which is reflected on the work page.

Many thanks to both Bruce and Larry. The padding properties worked well for the space around the Border of the text blocks. The paragraph spacing is still a problem, however. Making each paragraph a separate text block is going to be too much work.

I guess I'll just leave things as is for now. See http://open-mail.org/Registry.html my the current best effort - not enough space between the headings and the paragraphs, too much space between the paragraphs where I just added a whole blank line.

It seems like a simple and very valuable addition to the text editor would be the ability to add <spacer> tags where needed.

Try this where you want a smaller sized line break:

Set a small font, like 8 point

Press the Enter key to make the line break

Delete the standard sized line break if you have one.

Using 8pt blank lines for paragraph spacing helps a little, but I'm not sure it's worth the effort. I put a test page at http://open-mail.org/Test01.html for more experiments.

The best solution to all of these problems would be the ability to insert HTML tags within a text box. This must have been suggested before, but I didn't find anything in quick search of these forums.

You can add HTML code inside a text object. See Help->Tutorials->Adding Code. The key is to use the text editor Options->Option and Filter menu option to turn off the <>, & and " filters so these characters are not modified inside the text object and will be visible to your browser.

Just to let you know, the <spacer> tag was a Netscape tag and may not be supported in all browsers. It is not part of the W3C spec.

Oops. I guess my HTML Pocket Reference is a bit out of date. The <spacer> tag seems such simple and useful feature, there must be something better that took its place.