Previously: Marking myself into a corner, part 1
I found unexpected paragraph breaks in a post I’d written in Markdown, and copy-pasted into WordPress, about a day after I published it.
Clicking Edit showed I had line breaks in the Markdown source where there were paragraph breaks in the published post. I recognized this as WordPress’s wpautop filter, which uses different rules to place paragraph breaks than Markdown. A quick search shows this was reported upstream and closed as infeasible: jetpack#1965
I worked around it by deleting the line breaks.
Can I fix this with a plugin?
I tried dealing with this by using a plugin, Toggle wpautop, but found that wasn’t the right thing either; Jetpack Markdown relies on having wpautop active.
This is the second time I’ve encountered this; the first time was in 2019, when I was looking at moving from Hugo to WordPress. I felt overwhelmed and gave up on the project then.
This time, I looked back at the Jetpack issue, and saw there’s a workaround: calling wpautop( $content, false ); will do the right thing for Markdown posts. I haven’t found a plugin that implements this, but I might be able to patch it in to the one I’ve found…