Unwanted Italics in Widget Text

[Lindsey Carmichael]

Another weird question for you. I’m using the Dynamic Widgets plug in to control which widgets appear on which pages. The odd thing is, on some pages, the same widget appears in plain font, and on others, it appears in italics. For example, the About the Books widget:

Plain Text

http://www.lecarmichael.ca/about-me/for-the-media/

Same Widget, font in Italics

http://www.lecarmichael.ca/read-me/fox-talk/

I’ve looked through the settings in the widget control panel, and checked for HTML coding in my content, and I don’t see any red flags. Any ideas what’s up?

Thanks!

[Sushil Adhikari]

You will want to double check your widgets (that have the italics) because you have a lot of tags in each one which is creating the italics. the em tag is generally going to do italics.

[Lindsey Carmichael]

That’s the thing that’s weird about it though – there are no tags in those particular widgets. I triple-checked. And yet they display with italics, so the formating must be coming from somewhere else.

The weirdest one is About the Books, which shows plain text on the For The Media page, but italics on the Fox Talk page, even though the content of the widget is exactly the same.

[Sushil Adhikari]

are you using a third party widget plugin for this? Sometimes these add hidden code. If you are, perhaps try a default WP text widget.

[Lindsey Carmichael]

Fox Links and To Order are the basic WordPress Text widget, and they’re both showing italics. About the Books uses the third-party Attach Files plug-in. But I used Attach Files for the other sidebars on the For the Media page as well, and they display normally.

Very, very weird!

[Sushil Adhikari]

After having another look… I’m thinking it’s the Widget class plugin. You might want to double check the settings on the plugin if you are. I would recommend you look at your page with the italics and then look at the source code using your browser and find that particular content in the widgets area to see all the tags in there. One is right after the

heading which then has another nested that looks like this:

ABOUT THE BOOKS

How those got in there I have no idea, but you have something in your site that is adding a ton of tags in and around widget titles which really is puzzling me because the widget title

tag is coded in the theme files but no where in any of my themes do I use .

Double check your widgets in the page (not the post right sidebar column), but also check that your Widget CSS classes plugin is also not loading extra styles in (set everything to No. Another option is to redo the widgets, delete those that have the italics and rebuild them.

[Lindsey Carmichael]

I figured out where this was coming from – thanks!

[Sushil Adhikari]

You’ve got my curiosity…where did they come from?

[Lindsey Carmichael]

It turned out that I was using instead of to end the italics in some (but not all) of my other widgets, and somehow that coding carried over into widgets lower down the page.

These are the kinds of things that are totally obvious to anyone who’s been doing this more than 30 minutes, but I’m learning the hard way as I go. This morning I spent 2 hours trying to figure out why the colours in my header looked different on different browsers, and why the header wouldn’t load in IE8 at all. Turned out to be settings in Photoshop…. It’s a steep learning curve, but I’m clawing my way to the top!

Thank you for making a gorgeous theme that makes me look like I know what I’m doing, even when it’s totally untrue. 🙂

[Sushil Adhikari]

No worries…. as many often find out, making websites is actually not an easy job, even when something seems to be easy, it ends up being more complicated and time consuming work, and often includes lots of coffee, long days, and lots of swearing, haha.

[Author]

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