Shift + enter option?

Subject: Shift + enter option?
From: Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>
To: TECHWR-L <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2007 09:08:07 -0500

Michelle Anderson wondered (on behalf of an anonymous poster): <<I'm wondering if anyone has heard about using the "shift + enter" option to reduce the number of paragraph marks appearing in a document. I can find all kinds of information telling me that I shouldn't have paragraph marks with no attached text, but nothing that tells me what happens if I do have them.>>

Shift + Enter is not the solution any more than Enter is. The reason you shouldn't insert empty paragraph markers is twofold: it's easier and more efficient to adjust paragraph spacing using the paragraph style's settings (space after or space before), and a paragraph should serve a functional role defined based on its content, not simply a spacing role.

The layout-related problem with using extra carriage returns to create spacing is that the software then treats this the same way it treats any paragraph, and reserves a line of blank space whether you want one or not; if that line falls at the start or end of the page, as often happens after several rounds of revision, you end up with unwanted empty space that must be removed manually after each round of revision. In contrast, defining this blank space in the paragraph style lets the software automatically decide whether it's necessary to display the space or (at the bottom of a page, for instance) whether it can not display it.

The "function not format" role is unimportant in everyday typing, but it becomes significant when you're using structured content in which the content and the format are stored separately (e.g., XML, CSS). If you litter a document with empty paragraphs, what functional role do they serve? None that can't be better served by the formatting instructions. And because they're present in the document, they get the same formatting treatment as the paragraphs that actually contain useful information.

<<I know that corruption is often stored in paragraph marks, but everything I find talks about that occuring in the final paragraph mark of a document.>>

Strictly speaking, it's formatting information (not corruption) that is stored in the paragraph marks, and I've never heard that this causes any significant problems in any software other than Word. And yes, it's the final paragaph marker in a Word document that is most likely to become corrupted, for a range of possible reasons -- but mostly because the programmers who developed the .doc format should have been slapped hard and told to come up with something less elegant and more effective. Nothing much we can do about the current lousy format other than to learn about the common problems that arise and what workarounds to use when corruption does occur.


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shift + enter option?: From: Michelle Anderson

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