Why won't my text format properly?

Every so often a bit of text digs its heels in: you apply a heading style and nothing changes, or a paragraph stubbornly refuses to match the rest of the page. Nine times out of ten the culprit is hidden formatting that hitched a ride when the text was pasted in from Word, an email or another website. Here’s how to strip it out and start clean.

Fixing text that won’t behave

1. Open the article in the editor and highlight the stubborn text.
2. Click ‘Remove Format’ on the toolbar. This strips out the hidden styling that’s overriding your choices.
3. In the format dropdown, set the text back to ‘Normal’. That resets it to the page’s standard paragraph style.
4. Now apply the formatting you actually wanted, a heading style, bold, whatever it is, and it should take properly.
5. Click ‘Save’ and check the live page.

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Good to know

• Prevention beats cure: when you bring text in from anywhere else, use ‘Paste as Plain Text’ on the toolbar. It drops the old formatting on the way in, so the text takes your site’s styles cleanly.
• Links keep their link styling after ‘Remove Format’, which is right and proper; the link itself isn’t affected.
• Not sure what style a piece of text is using? Click into it and the format dropdown shows the style at the cursor, which is a quick way to spot a rogue paragraph.
• Avoid trying to fix formatting in the editor’s Source view unless you’re comfortable with HTML: one wrong deletion there can remove much more than you meant to, even a whole page’s content. ‘Remove Format’ is the safer route.
• If a page still misbehaves after all this, raise a support ticket and we’ll happily look at the page with you.