Extra line spacing throws off flow

[fiberdreams]

I noticed this morning that my theme was slightly out of date, and so ran the update. That went fine. Then I started looking at my pages, and all is not fine. The line spacing is all out of whack… on 150+ pages of my site. I’ve found that if I edit a page and remove all line feeds, then the page will look normal. Essentially, it’s turning all of my carriage returns into paragraphs. Where I normally have carriage returns so that the page is easy to edit, makes it visually stink. Didn’t used to do that. I’m frustrated, and am probably not explaining this well.

Let’s try a couple pictures. This is what a typical page looked like yesterday:

And now the text on my pages is all spread out, lots of extra whitespace:

You can see at center left of the first photo, that the buttons are supposed to be on a line together, but in the second photo they’re stacked. There is actually a linefeed between the two buttons, but until now the line feed has been ignored.

You can also see at the bottom of the first photo, over on the right, that the bullet list (check boxes) are nicely up against each other, no extra space. And now, if you’ll look at the right side of the third image, you can see how horribly it is all spread out.

All I did was update X Theme. I haven’t touched styles in at least six months. In looking at other people’s similar problems I tried this:
p:empty {
display: none;
}
which didn’t help at all, since those lines aren’t actually empty.

And I tried this:
p
{
border-bottom: none;
white-space: normal !important;
}
which also did nothing for me.

Help!
I really, really, really (did I say “really”?) don’t want to go through every single page in my site removing all of the carriage returns!
Help!

[ruenel]

Hello There,

Thanks for writing in! The extra lines is the results of the lines breaks that you have added when you inserted the block grid shortcode. The only way to resolve this is to edit each of those page/post and make sure that your shortcode will look like this:

[block_grid type="two-up"] [block_grid_item]Block Grid item contents [/block_grid_item] [block_grid_item]Block Grid item contents [/block_grid_item] [block_grid_item]Block Grid item contents [/block_grid_item] [block_grid_item]Block Grid item contents [/block_grid_item] [/block_grid]

Because if you insert it like this:

[block_grid type="two-up"] 
[block_grid_item]Block Grid item contents [/block_grid_item] 
[block_grid_item]Block Grid item contents [/block_grid_item] 
[block_grid_item]Block Grid item contents [/block_grid_item] 
[block_grid_item]Block Grid item contents [/block_grid_item] 
 [/block_grid]

then you will have spacing problems which is what is happening right now.

Hope this explains it briefly.

[fiberdreams]

But last week it wasn’t like that. Last week, I could have logical whitespace. If everything is all on “one line” I’ll mess it all up. Plus, I spent the last year revising those 150+ pages, and I really don’t want to do it again. Isn’t there some setting somewhere? Something that used to be set by default that isn’t now, or the other way round?

I’m weeping.

It’ll take untold hours that I don’t have to redo all of that. Again.

[christian]

Hey @fiberdreams,

If you check out our Block Grid shortcode usage demo here, you’ll see that it is not formatted with line breaks or “logical whitespace”. That is because our development team took into account WordPress autoformatting of content using the autop function.

You can disable autop using the suggested method here. Or, you can use a plugin like this.

Just note that disabling that might have consequences in some areas of your site. If that happens, regretfully, you will need to hire a third party developer to find a workaround for you or an assistant to edit your content.

Thank you for understanding.

[fiberdreams]

I’ll look at your links, but I’ve been using these short codes, in exactly the same manner, for more than a year, and now suddenly, with this last update, they break. To me that’s a bug.

More later, when I’ve had a chance to get some caffeine in me.

[rad]

Hi @fiberdreams,

Yes, please check it and let us know.

And it’s been like that, if there is a line break between shortcodes or text, it will be converted to <p></p> and <br> by Wordpress. It’s the same on old version too (I just tried), and it’s Wordpress doing.

Thanks!

[fiberdreams]

What I really, truly do not understand, is why this all worked as I expected it to yesterday morning, but after updating X Theme it stopped working. If it’s “always been that way,” as you all say, then WHY did it not do this to me before this with X Theme? And yes, I’ve been using X for years now. Years. Didn’t change a single thing on my site except to update X, and then it gets all messed up!

[fiberdreams]

So… My husband/webmaster created the autop plugin for me, put it in the appropriate directory. When I activated it, everything went back to normal. All pages on my site look the way they did before. Though I still don’t understand why this was not required yesterday, but it is required today, it does work. Hooray!!!

Thank you, @christian_y, for the links.

[rad]

Glad it’s working now. Maybe it’s a change between Wordpress and some theme feature. But it should work that way, always.

Thanks!

[alexander]

Hi there,

We’ve pushed out X 6.1.4, and Cornerstone 3.1.4 which includes relevant fixes for this issue. You can remove any temporary changes you’ve made to address the problem and update to the latest version. Let us know how it goes!

[fiberdreams]

Fabulous, @alexander! Thank you so much. I installed the updates, disabled the plugin from yesterday, and viewed my pages. Everything once again works as expected.

There is dancing in the streets.

Hooray! Thanks again.

[thai]

Glad to hear that