Word space after heading

Solution 1

You’ve loaded the titlesec package- it provides the command titlespacing which has the format

titlespacing{command}{left spacing}{before spacing}{after spacing}[right]

From the titlesec package

% spacing: how to read {12pt plus 4pt minus 2pt}
%           12pt is what we would like the spacing to be
%           plus 4pt means that TeX can stretch it by at most 4pt
%           minus 2pt means that TeX can shrink it by at most 2pt
%       This is one example of the concept of, 'glue', in TeX

A complete MWE follows

documentclass{article}
usepackage{lipsum}
usepackage{titlesec}

titlespacingsection{0pt}{12pt plus 4pt minus 2pt}{0pt plus 2pt minus 2pt}
titlespacingsubsection{0pt}{12pt plus 4pt minus 2pt}{0pt plus 2pt minus 2pt}
titlespacingsubsubsection{0pt}{12pt plus 4pt minus 2pt}{0pt plus 2pt minus 2pt}

begin{document}
section{Section}
lipsum[1]

end{document}

Solution 2

You can use the titlespacing command from the titlesec package. For example:

titlespacing{section}{0pt}{parskip}{-parskip}
titlespacing{subsection}{0pt}{parskip}{-parskip}
titlespacing{subsubsection}{0pt}{parskip}{-parskip}

See titlesec.pdf for more options.

Solution 3

If you are using setspace, then mixing it with your own linespread{1.5} is probably not a good idea.

Try to delete the line about linespread and use instead

usepackage{setspace}
onehalfspacing

The package documentation says that it does more than just change line spread: it also take care of skips before and after headings, displays, etc. — the things you say you need.

    documentclass{article}
    usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
    usepackage{geometry}
     geometry{a4paper,
     total={170mm,257mm},
     left=20mm, top=20mm, }
    
    title{Space handling in LaTeX}
    author{Yuri Gelsleichter}
    date{December 2020}
    
    begin{document}
    
    maketitle
    
    section{huge Increase Large space between headings and text}
    
    subsection{Using (texttt{textbackslash vspace{5mm}})}
    vspace{5mm}

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt. 

    subsection{Using (texttt{textbackslash vspace{1em}})}
    vspace{1em}

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt. 

    subsection{Using (texttt{textbackslash vspace{0.7cm}})}
    vspace{0.7cm}

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt. 

    vspace{2cm}
    hrulefill
    vspace{2cm}

    section{huge Decrease Large space between headings and text}
    
    subsection{Using (texttt{textbackslash vspace{-4mm}})}
    vspace{-4mm}

Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. 

    subsection{Using (texttt{textbackslash vspace{-1em}})}
    vspace{-1em} 

Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. 

    subsection{Using (texttt{textbackslash vspace{-0.4cm}})}
    vspace{-0.4cm}

Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. 

    end{document}

Related videos on Youtube

Proper text spacing is incredibly important. Get it right and your posts will be more readable and skimmable which leads to a better UX and longer session times.

Get it wrong, and your visitors will quickly hit the back button, raising bounce rates and killing your conversions (and harming Google rankings).

Out of the box, WordPress gives you very little control over the spacing of your text elements, such as headings, paragraphs and lists. Instead, spacing is mostly handled by your theme (or custom CSS).

In this guide you’ll learn: How to adjust text spacing in WordPress.

We’ll cover:

• Line height vs. Margin
• Spacing Units (px & em)
• Adjusting line-height
• Spacing between paragraphs
• Spacing between list items
• Spacing after headings
• Advanced text spacing

Line-height vs. Margin

The two most common types of spacing you’ll want to control in WordPress are line-height and margin. All text blocks utilize both these properties when determining white space.

Here’s an example:

Above you can see two short blocks of paragraph text.

Gap A is controlled by line-height, which is the line spacing within a block of text.

Gap B is controlled by Margin which is the spacing between elements.

Adjusting Line Height in WordPress

All text elements have a line-height property that can be adjusted using CSS. This includes Headings, Paragraphs and Lists. Your theme likely already has default line-height affecting these elements.

Recommended Setting: 1.6 is good line-height for most websites. This makes your line-height 1.6 times the font size (gap is 60% of font size).

To adjust it you can either:

1. Control it in your theme settings (if available)
2. Change it with CSS

Changing line-height with your theme

Check your theme’s typography settings which can be usually be found inside the WordPress customizer. For example, in my GeneratePress Premium theme I can control line-height, margin, and font-size for all my text elements.

Adjust line-height with CSS

You can easily add custom CSS to the WordPress customizer and override your theme’s defaults, but first we need to know what rule is currently setting the line-height so we can override it.

To do this, you’ll need to inspect the front-end CSS to find the correct selector.

For example, when I inspect a paragraph tag on my site I can see the line-height is being set by this rule:

My theme is setting a default line-height for any element inside the <body> tag (which is everything visible). To create more specific rules tailored to exact elements, we can use a more specific selector.

For example:

body {
    line-height: 1.5;
}

p {
    line-height: 1.6;
}

h2 {
    line-height: 1.4;
}Code language: CSS (css)

However this is an unusual example. 1.6 is a pretty good default line-height for most text blocks. But you can adjust this as needed.

Why line-height matters

A well-chosen line-height makes your content easier to read. You want enough gap that users can easily find the next line when looking back to the left edge of the text. You also don’t want it too large, which can require extra effort for the eyes, and can muddy the distinction between a new line and a new paragraph.

Spacing between Paragraphs

You want a clear break between paragraphs. This white space serves as a visual cue that each block contains a distinct idea. It also helps up break up a wall of text and makes your content less intimidating.

Spacing between paragraphs is controlled by margin. I prefer to use bottom-margin, but some theme developers use to top margin instead. Either is fine.

As with line-height, it’s good to check if your theme has a built-in paragraph spacing setting. Mine does:

My paragraph spacing is set to 1.3em, which works out to 23.4px (font-size of 18px).

You have a lot of flexibility regarding how much white-space to use between paragraphs. Just make sure it’s at least as big as your font-size, and ideally twice as big as the gap between lines (controlled by line-height).

Change paragraph spacing with CSS

Like with line-height, you’ll want to inspect your front-end using Chrome Dev Tools or Firefox DevTools to see which rule is setting your paragraph margin.

In my case, the rule is:

So I can override this by placing the exact same rule in customizer > additional CSS and changing the margin-bottom value:

For example:

/* Even more paragraph spacing */
p {
    margin-bottom: 1.5em;
}Code language: CSS (css)

The Customizer CSS gets loaded after your theme’s stylesheet, which lets you override the styles even when using the exact same selector.

Spacing between List Items

Controlling the spacing between list items in your ordered (numbered) and unordered (bulleted) lists can be a bit tricky.

Best Practice: Use margin, not line-height to control spacing.

To adjust the gap between list items, you should use margin. Changing line-height seems to work fine for single-line items, but causes issues if your list item wraps to multiple lines.

Try the toggle-switch below to see an example list with different margin-bottom values:

/* Normal spacing */
ol li, ul li {
    margin-bottom: 8px;
}Code language: CSS (css)

/* Extra spacing */
ol li, ul li {
    margin-bottom: 20px;
}Code language: CSS (css)

/* No Spacing */
ol li, ul li {
    margin-bottom: 0;
}Code language: CSS (css)

Spacing for Heading Tags (H2, H3, H4)

Heading Tags need sufficient white-space to give visual separation between the sections of your content. This is especially important for H2 tags (major headings) and H3 tags (sub-headings).

You want extra margin above your heading tags to provide a clear break from the text above, and enough bottom margin that it doesn’t crowd the text below. A good rule of thumb is a 2:1 ratio of space above/below your headings.

Using Chrome DevTools, here’s the spacing used here at BTW (shown in orange). I’m using a margin-top of 50 and margin-bottom of 20 (2.5/1 ratio).

Use CSS to change white-space for Headings

We can target our CSS rules using the appropriate H tag for each heading level. Depending on your theme, you may want to add the class of the content container for more specificity in your rules.

Here are some example values:

h2 {
    margin-top: 50px;
    margin-bottom: 20px;
}

h3, h4 {
    margin-top: 36px;
    margin-bottom: 18px;
}Code language: CSS (css)

To target these rules to only your content container (exclude sidebars and footer), you’d need the CSS class of your content container. You can find this by locating the parent container that holds all of your content. On my theme it’s .entry-content (yours will likely be different).

Then we can reformulate our CSS rules like this:

.entry-content h2 {
    margin-top: 50px;
    margin-bottom: 20px;
}

.entry-content h3, .entry-content h4 {
    margin-top: 36px;
    margin-bottom: 18px;
}Code language: CSS (css)

Learn more: How to properly use heading tags in WordPress

Advanced Text Spacing

We’ve already covered the most common white-space settings, which are line-height and margin. But you have even more CSS properties at your disposal:

Word spacing

You can adjust the gap between words by using the word-spacing property.

Example Usage:

p {
    word-spacing: 5px;)
}

Demo: word-spacing example

Letter Spacing

You can even tweak the spacing between individual letters. This is typically measured in fractions of a pixel, but you can make the value as large as you want.

p {
     letter-spacing: .5px;
}Code language: CSS (css)

Example: CSS letter spacing

White-Space

The less-known white-space property lets you control how white-space is handled within an element. For example, if you find that your buttons break on small screens (words wrap to multiple lines), you just need to adjust this property.

For example, you could target a specific button by its class-name to prevent wrapping.

a.button-name {
    white-space: nowrap;
}Code language: CSS (css)

Learn more: white-space CSS property

Single Line Breaks in WordPress

By default, WordPress creates a new block of text each time you hit the enter key. But what if you want to start a new line without creating a line-break gap?

You can just hit shift+enter to jump to a new line without a full line-break.

Like this:
See, no gap between lines!
Just hit shift + enter

Wrapup

Text spacing is incredibly important, and it’s worth putting the extra effort to customize it for a better user experience.

While WordPress has very few built-in text spacing controls, its easy enough to customize with a bit of CSS.

There are also several excellent themes with built-in text spacing controls.

Recommended Themes:

• GeneratePress (pro)
• Astra (pro)
• Blocksy (free or pro)

When using CSS to customize your text spacing, I recommend using the devtools feature in your browser to see which rules are setting the margin and line-height for your text elements.

For a crash-course in how to use Chrome DevTools for CSS, watch this video:

Unable to decrease spacing after heading

Hi,I had fiddled with word styles so that i could number my ‘heading 1’ as chapters. Now, somehow all the headings have space between the headings and the next normal paragraph (so it looks as if the heading and next paragraph are detached). But when i checked the settings, the ‘space after’ is set to zero. I am going mad. Please help. I have posted the settings of ‘heading 2’ below as an example.

Font: (Default) +Headings (Cambria), 13 pt, Bold, Font color: Accent 1, Keep with next, Keep lines together, Level 2
Tab stops: 1.18″, Left, Outline numbered + Level: 2 + Aligned at: 0″ + Indent at: 0″, Style: Linked, Hide until used, Quick Style, Priority: 10
Based on: Normal
Following style: Normal

/en/word2016/indents-and-tabs/content/

Introduction

As you design your document and make formatting decisions, you will need to consider line and paragraph spacing. You can increase spacing to improve readability and reduce it to fit more text on the page.

Optional: Download our practice document.

Watch the video below to learn how to fine tune line and paragraph spacing in your documents.

About line spacing

Line spacing is the space between each line in a paragraph. Word allows you to customize the line spacing to be single spaced (one line high), double spaced (two lines high), or any other amount you want. The default spacing in Word is 1.08 lines, which is slightly larger than single spaced.

In the images below, you can compare different types of line spacing. From left to right, these images show default line spacing, single spacing, and double spacing.

Line spacing is also known as leading (pronounced to rhyme with wedding).

To format line spacing

1. Select the text you want to format.

   

2. On the Home tab, click the Line and Paragraph Spacing command, then select the desired line spacing.

   

3. The line spacing will change in the document.

   

Fine tuning line spacing

Your line spacing options aren’t limited to the ones in the Line and Paragraph Spacing menu. To adjust spacing with more precision, select Line Spacing Options from the menu to access the Paragraph dialog box. You’ll then have a few additional options you can use to customize spacing.

• Exactly: When you choose this option, the line spacing is measured in points, just like font size. For example, if you’re using 12-point text, you could use 15-point spacing.

• At least: Like the the Exactly option, this lets you choose how many points of spacing you want. However, if you have different sizes of text on the same line, the spacing will expand to fit the larger text.
• Multiple: This option lets you type the number of lines of spacing you want. For example, choosing Multiple and changing the spacing to 1.2 will make the text slightly more spread out than single-spaced text. If you want the lines to be closer together, you can choose a smaller value, like 0.9.

  

Paragraph spacing

Just as you can format spacing between lines in your document, you can adjust spacing before and after paragraphs. This is useful for separating paragraphs, headings, and subheadings.

To format paragraph spacing:

In our example, we’ll increase the space before each paragraph to separate them a bit more. This will make it a little easier to read.

1. Select the paragraph or paragraphs you want to format.

   

2. On the Home tab, click the Line and Paragraph Spacing command. Click Add Space Before Paragraph or Remove Space After Paragraph from the drop-down menu. In our example, we’ll select Add Space Before Paragraph.

   

3. The paragraph spacing will change in the document.

   

From the drop-down menu, you can also select Line Spacing Options to open the Paragraph dialog box. From here, you can control how much space there is before and after the paragraph.

You can use Word’s convenient Set as Default feature to save all of the formatting changes you’ve made and automatically apply them to new documents. To learn how to do this, read our article on Changing Your Default Settings in Word.

Challenge!

1. Open our practice document.
2. Select the the date and the address block. This starts with April 13, 2016, and ends with Trenton, NJ 08601.
3. Change the spacing before the paragraph to 12 pt and the spacing after the paragraph to 30 pt.
4. Select the body of the letter. This starts with I am exceedingly and ends with your consideration.
5. Change the line spacing to 1.15.
6. When you’re finished, your page should look like this:

   

/en/word2016/lists/content/