Often we have bloggers ask about odd formatting issues with their posts. Where the text comes in a certain size they don’t want, or they can’t change the text to a Heading format after they’ve pasted some text in.
We’ve found that these cases come from bloggers who copy text from a website, email, or Microsoft Word. Each of these will add code to tell what size, color, bold, etc. to the text.
Here’s an example of what the text might look like in code:
<p style=”text-align: left;”><span style=”color: #0000ff;”><strong><span style=”text-decoration: underline;”><strong><span style=”color: #0000ff;”><span style=”font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;”><span style=”text-decoration: underline;”>STEP 2) ENTER YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION</span></span></span></strong></span></strong></span></p>
See all the <span> tags that start by saying, this text is aligned left, then it’s a certain color, then it’s bold, then it’s underlined, then it’s a certain font size. Another to note is the redundant bolds and underlines that are not wrapped around anything. Basically a ton of useless code in your way of making your text look how you want it. The example above will override the heading style I wanted to make it and keep it at 13 px text. It’s frustrating that you think you want it to be an H4 but it’s still small text.
There are two ways to fix this.
The first is more of a best practices method of not bringing along those styles when pasting text in. Simply click on the Paste as Text button in your toolbar and the text will come in clean.
The other option is a situation where you’ve already pasted text into your post. You can highlight the text and then Press the Clear Formatting button. This will do the same thing to make the text just text, with no styles. You can then add colors, if it’s bold, etc.
