When you paste text from your word processor into WordPress, it retains RTF (rich text), which means it looks messed up — different fonts, sizes, and other problems. What has happened? A bunch of code, which makes your text look proper on your word processor, has been retained and is not recognized the same way by WordPress.
To fix this, you need to remove that problematic code: you want to remove the html tags except links and paragraphs. You just want plain text, but with the links retained.
Unfortunately, you can’t do that, yet, with WordPress.
You can either paste as plain text (keep no paragraphs or links) or paste with all the RTF.
So we use on outside tool. There are a number, and if this one becomes unavailable, you’ll have to search for something that “stips html tags except allowed” or “except links.”
Here’s a video of how we do it. The video is 4 minutes long, including a re-cap, but actually doing it takes about a minute once you learn the procedure.
[youtube id=”7IqPcSs6PP4″ align=”center” autoplay=”no” maxwidth=”550″]
How do you do it?
Steps:
- Go to “Text” view for in your WordPress editor screen
- Highlight all text
- Copy it
- Go to http://www.zubrag.com/tools/html-tags-stripper.php
- Paste the text in
- Exclude <a>
- Click “strip”
- Copy the text it has stripped
- Paste into the “Text” side of your WordPress editor (make sure you did not leave any text from before)
- Go to the “Visual” side of your WordPress editor
- Place your cursor at the start of each paragraph and click “Delete” then “Enter”
Done.