Formatting--Inflexibility

Submitted by NancyJensen on Wed, 03/21/2018 - 03:14
Forums: 
Content creation

Hi,

I'm trying to create a course presentation that includes a slide that shows a short poem.  I have tried typing the poem in directly.  I have tried cutting and pasting the poem in from a Word doc.  Two things happen consistently. 

The first is that extra spaces are being added automatically between the lines and I can't remove them. This happens even if I copy over a single-spaced version from word.  The poem has three stanzas, the lines within each stanza should be single-spaced, with double-spacing between stanzas.  I tried typing in directly to the text screen, but I can find no option for single-spacing.  Sometimes in the text box the poem looks fine, but when I go to view the finished slide, the extra spaces are back.

If I accept the extra spaces--ensuring that extra wide spaces are between each stanza--I can't fit the whole poem on the slide unless I make the font so small it's not readable.

Any suggestions?  I've been working on this one slide for two hours, trying everything I can think of.  It's incredibly frustrating.

BV52's picture

BV52

Wed, 03/21/2018 - 04:10

Hi Nancy,

You are correct the text box really looks like having an extra space between them and I agree that it needs some improvement. 

I however found a work around. You can use the "table element", not only does it hace single spaces it also creates a scroll bar if needed. Here is a simple sample.

-BV52 

NancyJensen

Wed, 03/21/2018 - 14:00

Thank you so much.  This workaround was successful. 

I'll go on to explain in case someone else who needs a similar solution stumbles upon this forum.

I found I was able to use just one column and one row to get the effect I needed.  I had to type the entire poem into a single row, putting in an extra space between stanzas. (I deleted the second row and the entire second column.)  When I got to the slide screen, I had to adjust the vertical size to get the whole poem on the screen and make an adjustment to the right side to get the last word of a long line to pop back up onto the line where it belongs.  I was afraid the divder line and scroll would appear on screen, but when the slide was finished, that didn't happen.  And, unlike with my earlier attempts (when my edited screen would look okay) the finished slide looks great, showing the entire poem clearly on the slide in a readable font.

One more note:  I was able to obscure the lines of the table by using a dark blue background and changing my font color to silver after I had typed the text of the poem.  If I look really hard, I can see the lines are there, but someone coming upon the slide normally would never notice them lurking behind the dark blue.

BV52's picture

BV52

Wed, 03/21/2018 - 14:42

I'm glad it's working for you Nancy and thank you for the detailed explanation. This should help others in the community ;-)

-BV52