Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with whitespace

Stop my Outlook white space from growing.

soelo — Wed, 06 May 2009 11:26:27 -0800

I use Outlook 2003 in Windows XP, and the white space at the top of my reading pane slowly grows over the course of a few days. How can I stop it from growing? The Help --> About in Outlook says it's SP3, I assume that means service pack 3.
The problem happens on different .pst files, and all folders, Inbox, Deleted Items, etc. It's been happening for over a year now, and the only way I have found to fix it is to turn off the reading pane then close and restart Outlook.

I googled for help and only found others with the same problem and no helpful solutions. Thanks!

Dreamweaver noob CSS/template/float/whitespace question

momzilla — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 09:55:00 -0800

Dreamweaver CS3 newbie CSS/template/float/whitespace question I have created a few pages in Dreamweaver CS3 based on the "Two column hybrid, left sidebar, header and footer" template. The pages render perfectly on my computer; I tested them at every available resolution -- no problems.

When the pages were viewed by someone who really matters, they rendered funky, naturally. I wasn't present when he viewed them but what was described to me is that the main content was pushed down below the sidebar, thereby creating a ton of whitespace to the right of the sidebar. I have tried to recreate the problem on my PC but have not been able to.

I'm new to Dreamweaver/HTML/CSS, but from what I've read this sounds like a "float" issue, no? Am I barking up the right tree? I need to fix this ASAP, so any suggestions or expertise that is shared is greatly appreciated. Also, how can I make sure the issue is truly fixed when I cannot recreate the problem? Thanks in advance!

crop matlab plots

pravit — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 17:18:10 -0800

How can I automatically crop the whitespace in Matlab plots pasted into Word? I find a not insignificant portion of my time in report writing is spent cropping the extra whitespace around Matlab plots that are pasted into Word. Is there some way to eliminate the whitespace automatically, either with some nifty Word trick or by forcing Matlab to generate windows without so much whitespace around the plot? Thanks.

Translating 's/ */ /g' into T-SQL?

pompomtom — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 19:06:56 -0800

Fixing whitespace: Can someone translate 's/ */ /g' into T-SQL? Within a field I need to contract any number of spaces above one to one. LTRIM and RTRIM aren't any use, and while I can (and, indeed, have) bodged up a bunch of nested REPLACE(field, ' ', ' ') (that should be two spaces then one - but will be squished because MeFi knows how to do this!) together, I'm hoping there's a better way, which will deal with any number of spaces, without me filling the query with a bajillion nested REPLACE functions.

Article about the origins of white space?

Powerful Religious Baby — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 20:36:06 -0800

I'm trying to find a great article I read a year or two ago about the origins of white space in written text--does this ring a bell for anyone? It was a really interesting article--well-paced, informative, and awesomely free of the incoherence that chokes the throats of many similar articles with a kind of chunky obscurantist vomit. I thought for a long time that I first saw the piece on Arts & Letters Daily, but a search reveals nothing. Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Failing that, anything you can tell me about the origins of white space would be greatly appreciated. I seem to remember that monks had a hand in it, although I could be misremembering.

Carriage Returns in Excel

godawful — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 14:02:14 -0800

It's not how I'd choose to spend my Friday evening, but for the last few hours, I've been trying to replace carriage returns that have turned up in an Access and Excel file, and drawing a blank. I've done a thorough search of the archive, and I don't think this has come up before. I've also googled around and looked at specialist forums to no avail.

So, someone's kindly entered the text of about 200 articles into an Access database. They're destined for a website. Each one is paragraphed with what I assume are standard carriage returns which I need to turn into html paragraphs. (Once this is done, I plan to somehow import them articles and their metadata into the right columns of a mysql database.)

At the moment, I'm working on this data in Excel, which was the only way I could find to access it on my Mac. I'm also more au fait with Excel than Access.

I've tried a find and replace on the column of article texts, only to find that there's no way to tell Excel to find a return.

Another horrible hack I thought up was to use 'Text to Columns' using the returns as a delimiter. I could then have inserted tags and concatenated the new columns back together. Again I found no way to specify the return as a delimiter.

I found this note on a way to specify character codes, but I couldnt' make it work in these two cases. Are Mac character codes different?

I tried to use these character codes by adding a column next to the article text column (which is column K) with this formula:
=SUBSTITUTE(K2,CHAR(010),"

")

Again, no dice. It makes no substitutions at all.

Finally, I saved as a .csv, opened it in Textwrangler, and used an appropriate regular expression. It made the changes, but then I couldn't open the file in Excel. Something about a Sylk error.

If there's a simple way to do this in Access that I missed, I could go back to that.

Am I going to have to use VBA? There's a suggestion at the foot of this thread, but I don't know how to make it work.

As always, I'll be very grateful for any help at all.

Bulk-renaming Folders

fletchmuy — Tue, 31 Aug 2004 07:37:17 -0800

Is there a way to bulk rename a bunch of folders in Windows XP by just removing any white space? I want to upload these to a web server and would prefer avoiding the %20 madness.

Can anyone suggest a way to remove extra whitespaces from a string that exists in a Flash variable?

jpburns — Wed, 24 Mar 2004 07:29:39 -0800

Can anyone suggest a way to remove extra whitespaces from a string that exists in a Flash variable? [more inside] I'm messing around with a Flash animation that started out as a JavaScript. It generates a nonsensical phrase from sentence fragments, but the result may have multiple whitespaces in it, and I need to remove them (unlike the JavaScript version, which automatically discards multiple whitespaces...).

I think maybe the condenseWhite method may do this, but I can't figure out a simple way to implement it. Has anyone done this before?