Help:Paragraph spacing

The standard paragraph spacing on the "MonoBook" skin of MediaWiki may look a bit congested to some users. While titles and bulleted lists are widely used in most Wiki articles, MonoBook's paragraph spacing is about .5em, which can be difficult to read, especially in the case of long blocks of text. The solution proposed here can also be applied to other skins, including the Vector skin.

However, it should be noted that layout options like this are NOT part of MediaWiki's preference settings. Therefore, to make such layout or display changes to MediaWiki, it is possible to adjust them by tweaking the cascading stylesheet for the particular skin you are using in your MediaWiki deployment.

In short, this isn't a problem in MediaWiki that needs to be fixed. It is more about personal preferences. If you're familiar with stylesheets (or can learn them), then you can play around with different options using that indirect approach.

While stylesheets are an extensive topic, the following is a sample procedure to get you started.

Changing paragraph spacing

1. Find out which Wiki skin you are currently using. It is probable that it is MonoBook. You can check this in your user preferences.
2. Browse to the appropriate directory of your MediaWiki project. For example: User:<user name>/common.css
3. To edit the common.css file, use your favorite text editor (for example, vi). It may ask you to set permissions if you're not an administrative user. In that case, please talk to your sysadmin.
4. Insert your desired standard CSS code to adjust the relevant part of your document, and make sure you add a comment to help keep track of that change.

Following is an example for the last step:

/* Hanna trying to add more space between paragraphs */
p {margin-bottom: 1em}

Note that the first line (enclosed in /* */) is a comment.

The second line modifies the paragraphs (using the short form p), and sets the "margin-bottom" element to "1em". Note that em is a unit of measurement in CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). You could also try other units like centimeters (.6cm) or percentages (10%). This would set the stylesheet so that all pages that are rendered using it (including all Wiki pages generated using the MonoBook skin) should place a 1em margin at the bottom of each paragraph.

Please use caution when adding entries to a CSS file. Make sure you're not adding any lines between the lines of another CSS entry.