A client of mine who blogs with WordPress ran into an issue with new posts appearing on her site without the proper spacing between paragraphs. I’m sharing the solution in case others might find it useful.
Everything looked fine in the WordPress visual editor, but these posts looked wrong on the public website. I thought at first it was problem with the site theme / CSS, but older posts on the same site were displaying fine. The only way to figure out what was going wrong was to view these posts with the editor toggled from Visual to Text to reveal some code that shouldn’t have been there. Every paragraph was tagged as a div — which in HTML is a block of text with no default styling. Also, an empty div is not displayed at all, so the blank lines she thought she had in her copy disappeared on the public site.
I suspect the divs got in there because this content had been copied and pasted from some other source, probably some other web-based word processor or blog posting system. WordPress usually does a pretty good job of handling content posted in from Microsoft Word, but not necessarily other sources.
In visual mode, WordPress identified all these divs as paragraphs, by the way, which was not helpful. Once you have paragraphs tagged as divs, WordPress keeps tagging any additional content you insert the same way.
To fix the posts, I had to manually remove the <div> and </div> tags. What a WordPress post normally looks like in the editor is a mix of text and HTML (for links and images) with a blank line between paragraphs. WordPress normally handles these formatting chores automatically — it just doesn’t handle an attack of the divs very well.
