Description Formatting Issue

[EarthMarket]

I will format an item description and then when I come back to it again, the formatting is all messed up and it is lumping all of the paragraphs together into one- making it hard to read as there is no spacing between sections.

Descriptions never used to do this.

[ryanwanner]

@EarthMarketYeah, welcome to my frustration. This is something I've been leaning on the dev team for a while. On my account, I really noticed it when the two item libraries were merged a few months ago.

What I have noticed for me is that even though the formatting is wonky when looking at the item on the dashboard, the online listing seems to remember the formatting and shows it correctly. Sometimes it takes me going back into the description and reformatting it a couple of times for it to stick.

I'm really hoping there's a team trying to get to the bottom of this: it is definitely maddening.

[MayaP]

I'm sorry to hear you've been experiencing this ongoing issue as well! If you’re able to share a photo of what you’re seeing, along with any additional details, that would be super helpful as we investigate.

Thank you @ryanwanner!

[ryanwanner]

@MayaP  My apologies for taking so long to get back to this: I still see the formatting issue present on my item editor, and I have tried completely making the description in the text box then formatting and copy/pasting the text from a notepad doc then applying formatting. The line breaks simply do not show on the item editor but do show on the online store:

 Sooo, yeah. The idea of stripping formatting before pasting in the text box doesn't work for my problem.

[MayaP]

I appreciate your patience, @ryanwanner  It’s been a hectic week, and I’m just now seeing this. I’m escalating the issue again and will follow up as soon as I have an update. I’ll be out over the weekend, so you can expect to hear back from me on Monday.

Thanks again, and I hope you have a great weekend!

[MayaP]

Hey @EarthMarket – Thanks for bringing this to our attention! I’m happy to take a closer look.

Could you share a photo of what you're seeing on your end? Also, what browser and version are you using? If you haven’t already, try switching browsers and clearing your cache/history to see if that helps.

Once I have this info, I’ll go ahead and escalate the issue for further review.

[EarthMarket]

This is an example: https://www.earthmarketstore.ca/product/organicbox/2582?cp=true&sa=false&sbp=false&q=true

Note that the description is crammed together, whereas in the back end I will space it out, but when it saves, it then squishes it all together, messing up what I just formatted. 

[MayaP]

Thanks for your patience, @EarthMarket. Do you have a photo of what you want it formatted? I am assuming with paragraph breaks? 

[EarthMarket]

Yes paragraph breaks. I add them in but it doesn't save it properly  

[MayaP]

Thanks for confirming! Does our team have your permission to manually correct this on their end? I’m heading out for the night but will keep an eye out for your reply first thing tomorrow when I’m back.

@EarthMarket 

[EarthMarket]

Yes. It's on multiple items though not just the one. 

[MayaP · Accepted solution]

Our team confirmed that the issue is occurring due to formatting being carried over when the content is copied and pasted. The system isn’t recognizing the format correctly.

The workaround our team found is to first paste the text into a Google Form, strip the formatting, and then copy it back into the duplicated item. From there, you can manually reapply the spacing and bold styling where needed.

The team tested this fix, and the saved item has not reverted after two hours—so going forward, the best solution is to remove any formatting that's being brought in from other sources.

@EarthMarket 

[BHAKTIMOON]

This is still happening today. I will paste text into a description field and come back and it’s all scrunched together. Sometimes it still renders ok on the frontend (website view) but if I make any little change, nope! I have to add all my formatting back in.

I’ll try the suggested method of pasting plain text after stripping it in a text editor but that is a massive amount of formatting to be done after adding the description. In my case, I’ll need to format 300+ listings individually instead of once and done.

Suggestion to the development team: Maybe you could allow html to be read in this box so we could override whatever funky thing this text box is doing by hard coding it?

[seabeckstan]

I found that I can do this with a MS Word blank document. I create a description with formatting, then select it in my Word document and copy it into the Square item description.

[BHAKTIMOON]

Thanks, yes, that's my workaround too. Then any time I need to make a change, I change the document (I'm using Evernote) and do a full over-paste into the description field. I'm glad to hear you found the same method is useful!