Home Forums FineTunedMac Community FineTunedMac Feedback Trouble with list tag

I'm having a problem getting lists to display the way I want, so am posting here to see if someone (Hal?) can either spot where I'm going wrong or confirm that manipulating the list tag only works up to a point. Here's the story:

1. This is the first item in a numbered list.
   
   I can use returns to get an empty line between paragraphs/sentences within an item.
   
   As shown with item 2 immediately below, however, returns alone won't produce a blank line between items.
2. This is the second item. One might think entering returns between items would work the usual way, as it does within an item. Instead, the software strips out the ones between items when you submit the post, so no white space shows up between items 1 and 2 here...and the list gets harder to follow, to my eye anyway.
   
   (Returns still work fine within an item though.)
   
   
3. Using returns and a tagged space before this third item, I can force a blank line to appear between items 2 and 3 to improve readability. (*See "tagged space" note at end of post.)
   
   
4. This is the fourth item, with a forced blank line between it and item 3.
   1. So, it takes a bit of extra effort but it's possible to put some spacing between items to produce a list that's easier to read.
   2. But...if I do that and also include a list within a list like I am here in item 4, things go haywire. Look what happens when I now try to continue with spacing between items in the main list:
5. 
   
   
6. When I use the returns-and-tagged-space trick again to try to have an empty line between items 4 and 5, that blank line is stripped out. Worse, the content I've entered for item 5 doesn't show up there but instead appears as item 6...despite the fact that I haven't even entered a sixth.
   
   At least there's a blank line between 5 and 6.

Weird, eh? I keep thinking I must be making a mistake but I've tried with several different lists and I get the same results every time. Am I in fact missing some detail, or is the list tag just funky?


* For those who don't know, "tagged space" here means simply a space surrounded by some tags. I used Hal's "[i] [/i]" in my list above but have tried other combinations as well as dk's "[color:white]space[/color]" with no better luck.

It takes some tag manipulation to make [i] [/i] and [color:white]space[/color] show up so you can see what I'm talking about. When I tried to note the visible version of the italicized space in the list itself things got even more whacked, so I put the explanation down here rather than add another layer of complication up there.

I encountered the same problem you describe. I'll see if i can get it working... but i think i just cheated (and removed the strange parts) when i had trouble.

Let's see...

1. This is the first item in a numbered list.
   
   I can use returns to get an empty line between paragraphs/sentences within an item.
   
   As shown with item 2 immediately below, however, returns alone won't produce a blank line between items.
2. This is the second item. One might think entering returns between items would work the usual way, as it does within an item. Instead, the software strips out the ones between items when you submit the post, so no white space shows up between items 1 and 2 here...and the list gets harder to follow, to my eye anyway.
   
   (Returns still work fine within an item though.)
   
   
3. Using returns and a tagged space before this third item, I can force a blank line to appear between items 2 and 3 to improve readability. (*See "tagged space" note at end of post.)
   
   
4. This is the fourth item, with a forced blank line between it and item 3.
   1. So, it takes a bit of extra effort but it's possible to put some spacing between items to produce a list that's easier to read.
   2. But...if I do that and also include a list within a list like I am here in item 4, things go haywire. Look what happens when I now try to continue with spacing between items in the main list:
      
      
5. When I use the returns-and-tagged-space trick again to try to have an empty line between items 4 and 5, that blank line is stripped out. Worse, the content I've entered for item 5 doesn't show up there but instead appears as item 6...despite the fact that I haven't even entered a sixth.
   
   At least there's a blank line between 5 and 6.

Okay, looks like the way to cheat is by adding the extra tagged space within the sublist, *after* item b) before its closing [/list] tag --- not in the main list (before item 5):

1. one
2. two
3. three
4. four
   1. subitem 1
   2. subitem 2
      
      [i] [/i] <--tags are here, within the sublist [/list]
5. five

1. Fer cryin' out loud...
   • I tried so many different ways to make it work.
   • But that one never occurred to me.
     
     
2. And it's so simple.
   • Same trick, just different position.
     
     
3. Thanks, Hal!

There are other, less-forgiving UBB boards where the "space" trick doesn't work. I think macosxhints is one of them [VBB by Jelsoft]. Somehow they must parse posts differently, in an effort to remove all extraneous "spaces". In those situations, we must use an actual (non-space) character. The non-breaking space (entered on a keyboard via option-space) does work there (inasmuch as it expands the list), but for some strange reason they choose to display non-breaking spaces as a visible square: []

In such extreme cases, i use a period... and try to hide it with white color tags: [color:white].[/color]

I discovered a previously unmentioned aspect of lists tags...

I had written a paragraph in prose and decided that it really need to be in list form, and rather than break the paragraph up into its components and then insert the list tags I inserted the tags into the body of the paragraph, and lo and behold, the paragraph broke itself up into a list, complete with default line spacing.

Hot damn!