Fix WordPress Text

When you’re creating your blogs it’s natural that you’d want to use an application that you’re familiar with, so occasionally you may want to layout your blog in Word or even take it from a post that you have previously posted on Facebook but this can cause some issues in WordPress. I’m typing this blog directly into the text editor on WordPress and because I’m using the Visual editor rather than the Text editor what I type is what you see. Any paragraphs or line breaks that I add are retained in the live version of the page but any font or text formatting is controlled by my site theme. If I was to use Word to create my post first, when I copied and then pasted the text into the text editor on WordPress I may introduce code onto the page that affects the formatting of my paragraphs and even alters the style of my text outside of the control of the theme.

Classic Example

Below is a sentence copied from Wikipedia and pasted directly into the text editor (Visual Tab) Typesetting is the composition of text by means of arranging physical types^[1] or the digital equivalents. The text has been copied and any links that existed in Wikipedia have also been copied across, the word Typesetting is also in bold as it was on the Wikipedia page. The box below shows the HTML view of that sentence and you can see all the additional guff (technical term) that was copied along with the original words.

<b>Typesetting</b> is the composition of <a title="Written language" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_language">text</a> by means of arranging physical <a title="Sort (typesetting)" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sort_(typesetting)">types</a><sup id="cite_ref-typesetting_random_house_dictionary_definition_1-0" class="reference"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typesetting#cite_note-typesetting_random_house_dictionary_definition-1">[1]</a></sup> or the digital equivalents.

Using the method explained in the video the resulting text is below and no formatting from Wikipedia remains on our blog post. Typesetting is the composition of text by means of arranging physical types[1] or the digital equivalents. The solution is very simple and the video shows copying the text displayed in the Visual tab and pasting it into the Text tab, in effect you are removing any hidden code in one go.

Summary

Wherever you write your blog posts or whatever material you source from elsewhere, you should when possible remove any formatting which may affect the visual presentation of your blog post. The example I’ve given above wouldn’t do much to affect the presentation of your blog post but I have seen text copied from a Word document which would make most blog readers physically sick. The quick video shows you how to fix formatting issues but the most important step is