Well hello Troutish,
In the modern age of the xhtml transitional doctype and semantically sound markup, you should try and end your paragraphs not with linebreaks (which by the way need to be closed in xhtml like so: <br />) but with the paragraph’s closing tag (</p>).
Anyways, I think this is how it happens:
If you have the visual editor turned on (click ‘my profile’ in wp admin and find the checkbox), then your ‘write post’ page will have a tab to choose either visual or code editor.
If you use the visual editor, then when you hit enter, the current paragraph will be closed (with
) and a new paragraph will be started. In the visual editor, if you want to have a linebreak (which, remember, should not be used as a tool for making faux-paragraphs, and one reason why is because the paragraphs are then not styled properly with css)… anyways, if you want to have a linebreak in the visual editor, hold shift and then press enter.
If you use the code editor, paragraphs are NOT automatically created for you… instead, when you hit enter, a linebreak is created.
Use the visual editor when pasting in your web text. Any paragraph and line break formatting should be retained.
Does that help?
🙂
– John
Most of the posts are copied from blogger, no paragraphing is retained when copy & pasting from blogger into the visual rich editor….
Also, when editing these same posts in the visual editor (which I have been using the whole time), paragraphs will not end, period.
Writing posts from scratch in the visual rich editor doesn’t have any of these problems; it works perfectly if composed in the visual editor, just not when copy & pasted from elsewhere..
Will the visual editor detect paragraphs if there is already spacing between the paragraphs when it is copied over??? (for example, from notepad?) or do I have to insert the paragraphs once it’s in the editor??
When copying and pasting from other locations, I would highly recommend that you use the html editor and not the visual rich editor. Many times I have noticed that the rich editor gets wonky…especially when you copy and paste from another site such as blogger. For whatever reason, the semantic markups are copied, such as bold this and italic that, and they translate it to wordpress. Try copying and pasting using the html editor and see if the same thing happens.
I tested pasting the 5 paragraphs of text from the ‘homesick’ post at http://thevoxtrotkid.blogspot.com/ using the visual editor, and even though the blogger code used <br><br> to simulate paragraph breaks, the resulting wp code showed perfect paragraphs surrounded by <p></p> tags.
I also went back and edited this post using the vis editor, hitting enter in the middle of an existing para to start a new paragraph, and this also worked fine.
I’m running WP 2.1.2 though… maybe you could try upgrading?
thanks for the suggestions, I would love to upgrade but my server is only running mysql 3.2.* – I haven’t quite the time nor experience with updating MySQL myself yet, and I am hoping to move my site to a newer, better server with more space and manouverability.
I believe my problems would probably be resolved changing over to 2.1.* but for now can’t… I guess it’s just going to be a case of me going back and looking through posts in the html view after editing, to make sure no accidental
has replaced where <p> or </p> should be…
Thanks for your help everyone!
So you just came by to complain or would you like some help?
Care to point at an example of what is occuring? That way we can actually see what the issue is instead of making guesses.
Which editor are you using by the way? The regular text editor with the html codes along the top or the rich text editor with teh icons? Usually the regular text editor works better for folks if they care about the actual HTML that one uses. (Sounds like you do)
Don’t mind helping but being rude doesn’t give you that good of a first impression.
I came by to complain but it turns out I’m just being an ass.
WordPress wasn’t causing the issue, it was the theme (Mosaik 1.0). It’s a very nice theme but it’s breaking my code.
I took a look at the css code and nothing obvious is jumping out at me.
I’ve never seen CSS code that causes lines not to break so this is new to me.
Thanks
I’m having exactly the same problem!
I’m using Simple theme and it won’t show up paragraphs properly or line breaks at all (using <p> <br> and <br />).
What code in the theme could be causing this problem?
I’m unsure, I inspected some CSS elements from the theme that was breaking my <br /> and <p> and couldn’t find anything relevant.
SOLUTION :
My css file had this ->
p{
margin:0px;
padding:0px;
}
For the area in question that wasn’t breaking lines .. after removing it everything is perfect.
Cheers
A little more details here
i simply write an
<p> </p>
in my posts, this makes a blank row.
a forced line break like this:
<br> </br>
made me quicktag buttons with it…..
I know that this is several months old and so I apologize for resurrecting it but this was the top post in Google for one of my searches.
I find the visual editor in 2.2 to be completely dysfunctional, in both IE7 and the latest FireFox. I am trying to layout a page in it, something simple, with a few spaces, some images, some text next to the images, and so on… and no matter what I do, I cannot get any break returns or new paragraphs to be generated.
If I hit enter, which would presumeably make a new paragraph, no new paragraph is created… It just pretends like I didn’t do it when save/publish the page.
I have gone into the code editor, and added paragraph tags where I need them… the appropriate <p> and </p> around where they should be, and if I hit “Save” and then go back to edit the page — the changes that I made are gone, removed, nixed. This is remarkably troublesome and something that did not happen in prior instances of WordPress. To continue, even if I manually add the <p> and </p> in the code view, and then go to the Visual view, it removes the code that I added right then and there when I switch back. This is absurd.
I’ve tried using IE7 and FireFox to no avail, I don’t have any 3rd party plugins. I am using a custom theme but I’ve done themes in the past without trouble and this is happening with the default themes as well. WYSIWYG editors are a cool idea and they’re functional in many cases, but if you cannot add break returns or new paragraphs without the software removing them automatically — for no reason (as if the software thinks that it knows when I want paragraphs and when I don’t) — is a great hindrance.
Eh, I’ll keep trying…. but this is a huge problem for me.
Hi,
I am having the same problem as michaelbrazell. I cannot understand what the editor is doing with paragraphs under the Code tab.
It looks like it removes any manually entered <p></p>, and replaces it with line breaks in the text box.
However, because my css styles are not being applied to the paragraph, I am worried that it is not actually working correctly.
Under that code tab, I want to see the tags. The Visual tab is for the wysiwyged version. So is this a bug?
I want to remove the spacing between paragraphs, but I haven’t found a way to do it, so it would be useful if someone could explain exactly what is going on in the editor.
Cheers
Jeff
Well this is just outrageous.
Seemingly nobody knows why on earth all <p> tags are being stripped from posts and pages when they are edited.
