Wikipedia:Avoiding text gaps

There are techniques to avoid text gaps, an issue that may appear in formatted pages on certain browsers. Note well: there exist automagical templates to fix text gaps caused by image/template stacking, see Template:Stack begin for basic instructions.

Text-gaps are most likely to occur only in browsers similar to Internet Explorer (IE6, IE7, IE8,...), where a large blank area will occur to the left of an image located a few lines below an upper image (or infobox). Typically, a text-gap can be closed by moving the image (from alongside the text-gap area) to be directly stacked below the higher image (or infobox). Another solution might be to set the lower image as "|thumb|left" to display the image at the left-side margin, allowing text to wrap and fill to close the gap. Users running the Firefox browser, Google Chrome 9 or Opera 11.01 (or similar) will not experience the text-gap problem. Hence, those users might have no idea that users of IE browsers are seeing a large text-gap beside the image.

Option 1: Stack images/infobox together
The original location of the lower image, causing a text-gap, is typically along the right-side margin. For that reason, keeping the image to the right, but moving it to be stacked, is often the easiest solution. Simply move the image-link to be directly below the upper image or infobox. If there are multiple images, positioned every few lines along the right-side margin, then consider stacking all, of the nearby images, below the 1st image in the group.

Option 2: Move the lower image to left-side
For articles with several long sentences in the intro, an image could be moved to the left-side margin, perhaps after the 1st paragraph of the intro text. A left-side image (with options "|thumb|left") will float, higher, allowing an infobox to be displayed at the right-side margin. A complication, with left-side images, is to be sure to word-join 3 words after the left-side image, such as: "{&#123;nowrap|The town was founded}}" to avoid 1-word-per-line text wrapping (on narrowed windows).

Any subsequent text, below the 2nd image, will float towards the right-side of the lower image and higher, towards the 1st image, and close any text-gap area which was formerly alongside the lower image.

Option 3: Put image inside a Floatbox
A third possibility is to use {&#123;floatbox| }}, to cause the lower image to float to the immediate left of the upper image (or infobox), and allow any subsequent text to wrap along the left side of the page.