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No paragraph spacing in Explanatory Note after import from legislation.gov.uk

Issue description

When you import a Statutory Instrument from legislation.gov.uk, the import will include the Explanatory Note. This will appear in the Editor as normal.

However, when the Lawmaker document is rendered as a PDF, the Explanatory Note will appear without spaces between paragraphs.

image-20250219-122039.png

An imported Explanatory Note rendered without spacing between paragraphs

This is due to the way that the underlying XML data for Explanatory Notes is stored on legislation.gov.uk, and how this is transformed on import into Lawmaker. Specifically, when imported to Lawmaker, each paragraph of the Explanatory Note is wrapped in an individual ‘blockContainer’ element.

Workaround

To rectify this issue, please take the following steps:

  1. Select the first paragraph of the Explanatory Note by clicking your cursor inside it and clicking ‘Text’ from the breadcrumb (see screenshot 1 below).

  2. press Ctrl-X to cut this paragraph.

  3. Click inside the Subheading of the Explanatory Note (e.g., ‘(This note is not part of the Order)’).

  4. Press Ctrl-V to paste the paragraph.

  5. Delete the empty blockContainer element where the first paragraph used to be by clicking inside the blockContainer placeholder, selecting 'blockContainer' from the breadcrumb (see screenshot 2 below), then pressing backspace.

  6. Repeat steps 1.-5. for the next paragraph - for step 3., click inside the previous paragraph, i.e. the one that you just pasted, before pasting the next paragraph.

  7. If the Explanatory note contains a Table, repeat steps 1.-5., but select ‘Tbl block’ from the breadcrumb instead of ‘Text’.

  8. Continue until all the paragraphs of the Explanatory note have been copied and pasted.

When you render a PDF, you should now find that the Explanatory Note has the proper spaces (see screenshot 3 below).

Screenshot 1 (step 1)

image-20250219-134421.png

Screenshot 2 (step 4)

image-20250219-135035.png

Screenshot 3

image-20250219-124543.png
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