In Plasma 5, the Digital Clock defaults to much smaller horizontal margins when the system bar is positioned vertically. Here is an example:
In Plasma 6, that doesn’t seem possible, or at least I can’t get that by changing the Digital Clock settings.
Am I missing something? The Plasma 5 solution seems to be much better.
hi, welcome.
if you choose edit mode by right clicking on the taskbar it should offer you a bunch of blue highlights as you hover over things.
hover over the margin area and see if there is not a hightighted component you can select and remove… margin separator or some such comes to mind, can’t remember exactly as i deleted mine from the plasma 5 kubuntu taskbar ages ago.
but if you can delete that, it should reduce the margins on either side of the clock.
you can also use custom formatting for the date that will allow you to split onto separate lines so the font will be easier to read.
something like this ddd M/d yyyy
Thanks, that helped! I changed the format to wrap word; it’s not ideal, but at least readable.
I can’t see any additional separator and I see no easy way to change margins
Perhaps there is something about the margins too! If I move the clock outside the system tray on the bottom, it gets larger. I’m not sure how to remove the margins on that lower part
do you still have “add panel” to the context menu when you click on the desktop?
if so what panel choices does it offer you?
my plasma 5 used to offer me a choice between default panel and kubuntu panel irrc, but for some reason today i cannot add any more panels to my desktop.
not sure why that is.
there is a new feature in edit mode called “manage panels” but it does not let me ADD one.
something seems off today, perhaps i will reboot again.
at any rate the kubuntu panel had the padding, but the default panel did not, so maybe see if that’s an option for you and then build a new task bar from the panel without the padding.
good luck, rebooting now for the 3rd system update today (what is going on over there?)
I messed around with panels. In the end, I managed to remove all the bottom part from the bigger-padding slice. Thank you for your help! 
I wish you a week with very few system updates 
maybe next week 