Why is there a vertical gap between adjacent divs when selecting text? - css

I'm making a rich text editor which is like a clone of Google Docs. For reasons I won't get into here, each line in the text editor is wrapped into its own div container. For example, if there's 3 lines of text, there will be 3 child "line nodes" (rendered as an unstyled div) in the text editor. And within each line node there are inline span elements to control styling such as Bold, Italic, etc.
The issue I'm having is I can't understand why there is an unsightly vertical gap of whitespace between each line when selecting text over multiple lines. I am using Draft.js for this, but from what I can see it shouldn't make a difference; there's no styling or margins applied. I've even tried making every line div and its span elements exactly the same height but the problem persists.
My guess is this is caused by some native browser behaviour. All I really care about though is: can I "fix" it? I mean, I know it's possible because Google Docs doesn't have this spacing issue when selecting text... But then again it uses a completely custom rendering engine with custom cursors too. Thanks for any suggestions
edit: so a temporary workaround I've found (see image below) is to reduce the height of each div and span to a fixed value (in this case, height: 16.4px). But for obvious reasons, this isn't an ideal solution. I'm still looking for a "proper" way to implement whatever styling I want and not have these gaps appear between adjacent divs when selecting text

I believe your talking about line-height in which you can control the space between two elements / texts.
Try it out below:
div {
line-height:100px;
}
<div>Hello World!</div>
<div>How are ya?</div>

Thank you for all the suggestions. Turns out this is quite a challenging issue and there's very little (if anything) that can be done with pure CSS. Only the height attribute of div or span elements appear to have any visible impact on text selection. Inspecting the Google Docs elements reveals they use their own custom selection engine:
Closing this because I at least know how a solution might be implemented now, even if it would be very complex and time-consuming. Thanks again for the suggestions.

Related

How does one force a <button> tag to display:inline?

Check this out:
http://codepen.io/maxwbailey/pen/vGKBr
Now, they look fine when you aren't hovering over them, but when you hover over the <button> and <input> elements, you'll see that the text below them is bumped around a bit, while hovering over the <a> element does not cause the same effect. That's because the <button> and <input> elements are displaying as inline-blocks still (which handle borders, padding, and margins differently than regular inlines), despite the display: inline !important; line that is applied to them.
Is there anyway to override this? I know it's doable via hacks like borders with the same colour as the background, etc. but I'd really like to know if there's a way to make them display: inline properly.
Note: The problem here isn't about the text being bumped around (though that is an effect of it), it's that, despite everything saying otherwise, the browser is still forcing the button to display as an inline-block. Thanks to everyone who's provided methods to prevent the text bumping from happening, but that's not the real problem here.
Thanks!
Not sure the context of why your markup exists like this, but the issue looks like it's being triggered by setting the font-family. If you take a look at this pen - http://codepen.io/pnts/pen/Egwuo - the hover works fine without a font-family specified, but if you uncomment the line specifying one, the jumping begins.
It seems your question is a little misleading. Your button tag IS in fact set to display:inline on both normal and hover states. It sounds like the question you have is how to prevent the text below from getting bumped down on rollover. Instead of using a bottom border as you are currently, why not use the following in the hover state to achieve the underline?
text-decoration:underline;
agree with the previous answer, however if you want the flexibility of a border, being able to use padding to adjust where it lays etc, you could use
border:1px solid transparent;
not as hacky as using the same color as you bg because it doesn't matter the color of the background that way.

Overflowing select highlight

What is the logic of the selection highlighting overflowing beyond the parent element?
In the attached screenshot, the top one is what I have currently, and the bottom one is a Photoshopped mockup of what I want to achieve.
To me it seems that the selection highlighting is almost largely random; I have not been able to find any definitive resources that explain what makes selection highlighting behave in which ways.
What should I keep in mind in terms of CSS and DOM when wanting to keep the selection highlighting reasonable?
Interestingly, I've wondered why SO doesn't have something like this so it's easier to copy code off an question/answer.
Actually, SO does have contained highlighting in the <code> blocks relying on overflow: auto;. <blockquotes> do not have contained highlighting.
Anyway, it appears there are a few ways to solve this problem (though, I'm sure there might be more). Use one of the following CSS rules to limit the highlighting of text to a specific element.
overflow: hidden; or overflow:auto;
position: relative;
float:left; or float:right;
The working example below shows all four methods at work. Some are easier to work with depending on your needs.
Working Example: http://jsfiddle.net/TFvYu/4/
Sources
CSS text selection color overflows outside box
HTML/CSS How to prevent highlighting text from spanning entire width of page in google chrome

3 DIV's in a row, Can't keep text in the div

I was able to get three div's in a row, no sweat. Where the problem lies when the site is done some pages have text in the center column, however when i start typing the text spills over into the other divs..... The text doesn't wrap (stay in that div)
I'm sure I am probably missing one little dumb thing but any help would be greatly appreciated!
I uploaded a test of it for you guys to see:
http://graves-incorporated.com/test_sites/solera_new/test3col.html
and with the text spilling onto the next div:
http://graves-incorporated.com/test_sites/solera_new/test3col_2.html
I think you worry about nothing. Words like
Stufffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffdddddddddddddddddddddddddddddfffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff
are not found in many languages. You will see if you put normal language in your div, the text will not overflow at all
You could always use CSS's word-wrap CSS Word-Wrap example.
Or PHP's wordwrap() function PHP Word-Wrap example.
There are various ways you can approach it, but that should set you off in the right direction :)
I Think you must use a proper language then it will not go out of Div's Width , Becase your DIV is already in a Fixed Width.Just use another the good words instead of stuuuuuuuuuuuufffffffff. It will work fine then :).
overflow: hidden will help prevent it from breaking the layout, although some content may be hidden. I would suggest word-break: break-all, but that has a tendancy to break words unnecesarily.

CSS second-line indent not working

Page in question: http://www.rjlacount.com/public/lander/
I'm probably just doing something stupid, but I'm trying to indent the second line of wrapping text inside the form (with "Your account: test#test.com" at the top) and I can't seem to get anything to work.
I would think the solution is:
form span {padding-left:1.5em;text-indent:-1.5em;}
but this only seems to indent the first line of each section.
Another look at this would be much appreciated, thanks!
If the element is inline it will indent the first line, otherwise if it's a block element it will indent the rest of the lines, which is just like Briguy37 said, since that's the difference between DIV and SPAN.
I just wanted to clear out that it's not a "problem with span".
For some reason, this works with a DIV, but not with a SPAN. Not really sure why, but here's a fiddle with the same CSS for both.
spans are handled as inline elements.
Considering them as actual characters helps to conceptualize the changes. A space after a span is retained because it's like a space between characters. You adjust height by line-height rather than simply height. etc etc
Usually if this is causing a problem you can just use a div and set display:inline-block; if you need horizontal alignment.

CSS margin-transference bug (ie6 + ie7), would like input

I am almost done with my project, but have one final looming problem that I'd like some advice on. Info on the CSS "margin transference bug" relating to ie6 and ie7 can be found here and here.
So I have all of these heading tags with margin-bottom: 24px. They sit above any number of left-floated divs, depending on the page.
Each of the floated divs sitting below the heading tags "inherit" the heading tags' margin of 24px.
Short of putting EVERY SINGLE heading tag in it's own div, I am out of ideas. Do you have any ideas?
EDIT:
Maybe a BETTER question is, "how would you add space below all heading tags without using margin?" Line-height isn't quite cutting it, but what about padding-bottom?
If you're not using background images or background colors behind your headings, I don't see any problem with using padding-bottom.

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