I recently had to change a hard drive on my iMac, and was using a stack which i think was called SPACER, it was really excellent in that allowed me to adjust the space between stacks from 1 to 100 pixels.
I believe it was a free stack.
I would really love to find this stack again but have looked in vain up until now, and do not know who the developer was, and also i cannot find it in my backup for some reason.
So if anyone is using this stack and knows who the developer is or has a link that would be much appreciated.
Well that video has certainly opened my eyes, and it’s something i never thought of in terms of spacing, but it’s exactly the same, and as Joe explains in the video it’s included ( of course ) in every stack.
I guess sometimes we get caught up in our own, and different workflows and “can’t see the wood for the tree’s” as the saying goes.
I now have a major update to a website, and i’m going to drop all the spacer stacks and see what happens with the padding and margin controls.
I’ve not seen that video before. In my opinion that video is very misleading and chooses to skip-over some critically important points of Spacer:
Spacer is automatically hidden on print and PDF output, which means you do not have miles and miles of wasted space on your printouts
You can setup Spacer as a user-stack (Stacks 2) or a partial (Stacks 3), so you can quickly reuse the same stack (and configuration) over multiple pages of a website
The responsive controls can be used in Stacks 3 to easily hide Spacer on mobile, tablet or desktop in a single click
As well as pixel and percentage units of measurement, you can also do spacing in EM’s, centimetres and inches - which is really important for some users
The settings of one Spacer on a page can be cloned onto other spacer stacks, for more consistent spacing
The stack is a single line of HTML code. It does not fill your pages full of garbage code, inline CSS or anything to harm SEO
Spacer supports decimals and does not round your numbers
The idea that only 1% of people use percentage units of measurement is highly questionable and I don’t know where that statistic has come from. Stacks can only do padding and margins with pixel units of measurement. I see many people using Spacer with percentage units of measurement; therefore ensuring their spacing scales smoothly and proportionately on any screen shape or size.
Visually it is easy to look at a page in RapidWeaver edit mode and see where your Spacer stacks are. Whereas if you apply padding or margins, it is harder to see what spacing is applied and it sometimes takes many more clicks to view this information.
Spacer is a free download - always has been and probably always will be. It’s consistently the most downloaded stack on the website. It was also the first stack I developed and released. I have no plans of killing it off! It is a fantastic tool if you use it properly and appreciate how it’s been engineered to work in modern webpages.
There is an update coming to Spacer stack very shortly. I’ve added support for viewport units of measurement, which are extremely powerful and useful in responsive setups. Also Spacer will display dimensions in edit mode, so it will be even easier to see how each Spacer on a page is configured. The update is done and tested, but I’ve not had time to publish it yet.
As I said in the video (which was 2.5 years ago), that your spacer stack had the most interesting features out of all of the ones available. I still stand by my opinion. People vastly overuse these type of stacks when they could just use margins.
I don’t want to get into a debate about it… I did release the king of all Spacer stacks this year though…
Many thanks for getting back, i apologise for the delay.
I must admit i hadn’t thought of what joe’s video explained and thought this was a cool way to get around the problem of spacing, even though i had just re-downloaded your spacer stack again, and decided to give joe’s idea of padding and margins a go.
I’m creating a community / town website where i live in Eastern France which currently runs to 32 pages.
So went ahead and decided to use joe’s method for the first 4 pages to see how i got along, and i must say it was ok, but a little time consuming in relation to adding a spacer stack, then adding the given pixels and moving onto the next part. But after a complete day redoing the 4 pages i have decided to go back to the spacer stack, so much simpler, for me anyway.
It was a little like moving from Photoshop to Gimp for example. After 20 years as a Photoshop user trying to work with gimp, or any other image software just doesn’t feel right, trying to get to know the in’s and out’s of a new software package doesn’t feel easy.
I’ve always used Spacer and found that it suits my workflow perfectly. Each to there own as the saying goes.
As for the technicalities and whats under the hood of the Spacer stack i’ll leave that to you the developers. It work’s perfectly for what i want.
Once again many thanks for the response and taking the time.
I will continue using the Spacer stack, simply because it suits my workflow, but having said that i have learn’t something new from your video to concerning padding and margins, so that was great too and i’ll be using that a little more to know in my workflow, certainly in terms of left and right padding and margins for precise placing of objects and text.
Once again many thanks even though your remarks where aimed more towards Will than me.
I like using the Spacer Stack for one simple task and that’s when I want the spacer margin to appear on a desktop display but NOT on a mobile device. Using the Spacer Stack I can choose to hide the Stack for mobile usage so you can’t see it on small screens but do on large displays and vice versa as in the following example…
I will frequently use it when I have a two column Stack in RapidWeaver project. Typically I would want the tops of both columns to align with each other on any screen that displays 'the content as two separate columns. But on handheld devices everything is shown in one single column so that means the top of column two will be directly below the bottom of column one and quite often butted up to each other. This is where the Spacer Stack comes in. I drop the Stack in above column two but switch off the display of this Stack (in the Stacks visibility settings) for Desktop and Tablet but leave it on for Mobiles so that it only comes in to effect when the content is displayed as one column. Something I don’t think you can do as easily without the use of a Spacer Stack.
