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Jerimy_Brown1
January 4, 2023

[LAUNCHED] Paragraph spacing settings break when mixing styles in single text block

  • January 4, 2023
  • 21 replies
  • 3085 views

Paragraph spacing breaks if you mix text styles in a single text block.

Ideally this would function in such a way as to take on the paragraph spacing per style instead of assuming everything in a given text block wants to use the same paragraph spacing.

If the paragraph spacing was inherited by selected items, the same way the rest of the text style is, it would make quick single text block styling possible…

Right now you have to create individual text blocks every time the style changes and then merge them with an autolayout, then if you want different spacing you end up with a bunch of embedded autolayouts, which works, but it’s messy.

21 replies

djv
Figmate
Community Support
March 27, 2023

Hey All,

Sorry for the trouble!

Our team tried to reproduce and the only workaround they found was by removing any bullet points from the text layer, then re-adding them manually with keyboard shortcut (Mac: option + 8 , Windows: ctrl + Shift + L ), pressing space and allowing Figma to automatically add the list style and hitting undo. Then, you should be able to add spacing as normal without it affecting the type settings.

It seems that the error occurs if bullets are in the same text box as other text with text styles applied. So if you remove all text styles in the text box, it should work.

April 26, 2023

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.

Dominic
Active Member
May 9, 2023

@dvaliao Unfortunately this isn’t a bullet list specific issue. The real issue is that paragraph spacing does not work if multiple Text styles are used in the same text box. This makes the feature somewhat useless, as paragraph spacing is primarily used by designers to separate headers from body text.

djv
Figmate
Community Support
May 10, 2023

Thanks for clarifying, @Dominic!

The team confirmed that this is currently an expected behavior. A limitation of our implementation of text is that you can only set one paragraph style for an entire text node. In other words, you cannot have multiple paragraphs in one text node that each have different spacing.

Because of this, only the “overall” paragraph spacing of the node matters. If you set an override of a paragraph style within a text object, we simply don’t support changing the paragraph spacing at this time.

Given the feedback above, clearly, this is an issue that should be changed in the future. We’ve updated this topic to a feature request, so our team can continue to collect feedback and use Votes to see how it’s affecting the community.

Dominic
Active Member
May 10, 2023

Thanks @dvaliao, from a developers perspective I totally get it. They’re not fans of rich text boxes (multiple styles in one). From a designers perspective it really limits paragraph spacing’s full potential and imo its primary function.

Ricardo_Desirat
New Participant
November 22, 2023

Great that @dvaliao has merged other similar posts into this one. (thanks)

I think that with all the power that “Dev mode” is getting and the potential to conform Figma to HTML, it will be a great upgrade to change the single <p> node to a <div> and have the normal h1, <p>, <li> etc children inside with their respective format, which, probably, will resolve this.

Maybe we can start adding “classes” to elements and format them. Which is super intuitive and powerful.

And as a developer & designer I can say it’s a great way to unite the two.

I don’t know if there is a topic about what I’m suggesting but, if there is, please let me know to vote there too.

Leslie8
New Participant
January 18, 2024

Issue still occurring today. Voted.

BradS
February 11, 2024

Voted… it’s silly that this is still an issue. It’s not at all how someone who is used to working with styles in any other layout tool would expect it to behave.

mbeyer
February 20, 2024

I started using Figma today to see if we could use it for our redesign project.
Ran into this error and couldn’t believe that this is expected behaviour.

Pretty much renders the whole style concept useless for our purposes.

EDIT / UPDATE:
After a few days of testing I now see the idea behind the whole frame concept.
Figma’s a really powerful tool, but especially in text handling there is much room for improvement and things I dearly miss (e.g. derived text styles, using variables in text parameters)

July 25, 2024

I really don’t know what to do.
Ive restarted Figma, chosen one text style, in fact its just normal copy, just headers in uppercase and it still is broken. I simply cant get the copy to run normal on its own paragraph. I do my work on here and this is so frustrating because im spending time to fix something that cant be fixed? Or is this a completely diff problem?