A couple of issues that have been driving me nuts

Ever since I upgraded (?) to version 1.5 I've been experiencing two little bugs that I just can't stand anymore.

1. The space between blocks of text are about triple what they should be. I've tried multiple editors and even hand coded a few listings. They look great in the preview, but once they're posted seperate paragraphs appear waaay too far apart. It forces me to either write all my product descriptions in one paragraph, which is hard to read, or just deal with the text blocks being seperated from each other by about six empty lines.

2. An oddball character (capital A with a caret over it?) that shows up at random intervals in the text. It doesn't appear in the preview, only in the posted products. Sometimes it appears where an extra space was typed between characters, but not always.

These drive me crazy. I have a busy little store, and I sell on other venues as well, so I have never found the time to go edit and reedit and reedit every listing to get rid of the little As and no matter what I do the extra line spacing just makes me want to hit something.

If you want to see what I'm talking about, here is a link that clearly shows both problems: http://yourbuttonshop.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=33_35&products_id=526

I really want to install some more upgrades and do more with my little store, but everytime I start working on it these two issues make me run away. :(

Can anyone here help me figure out why this is happening so I can fix it?

1. It looks like you pasted that description from some sort of WYSIWYG editor, considering all the inline styling. Make things easier on yourself and remove all the styling that's in the code (font, padding, etc.) and style the description in the stylesheet (#productDescription rule).

2. I think the weird character thing is caused by a character set mismatch - http://www.zen-cart.com/content.php?313-should-i-convert-my-store-from-iso-8859-1-to-utf8

BTW, have you seen your site in Firefox ?

I installed the CKeditor, thinking that might fix the problem, but it didn't.

No, I haven't seen it in Firefox, why?

2. Right. The  symbol is a result of a character set mismatch.

3. Yes, firefox displays your site badly.

Okay...what can I do about the character mismatch?

I'll deal with whatever happens in Firefox later; one headache at a time. Thanks for letting me know, though. :)

I had a similar issue when I upgraded to 1.5 from 1.3.9.
I believe the issue is related to the fact (in my case anyway) the language type changed from latin1 to utf8 when I upgraded.

The simple fix I did was to run a find and replace query that basically deleted the bad characters.
This is a sample of the query I ran, you should try this on a local (NOT production) server, i.e. test server before running on your site store.

update products_description set products_description = replace(products_description, 'Â', '');

'update products_description' is the table name to update.
'set products_description' is the field in the table to make changes to.
'replace(products_description, 'Â', '')' this looks in the field 'products_description' for the unwanted character 'Â' and replaces it with nothing, effectively deleting it.

if the issue is in other tables you can update the table and field names as needed.
This is a list of characters I removed using this process.

'’'
'â€'
'Â'
'Â'
'Ã'

Good luck.

I believe the  is a non-breaking space ( ) being viewed in iso-8859-1 but encoded in another charset. WYSIWYG editors love to create a lot of non-breaking spaces. The best way to keep the code pure is to use a plain text editor. In order to get rid of what you have, the suggestion by potteryhouse should take care of it. Just be sure to backup your database before doing it.

It seems that you have stylesheet problems also. Your sight displays badly for me in Firefox and IE.

Good luck

Okay; Potteryhouse, I'll give that a try. Thanks!

Joe, thank-you, too. I'll download Firefox and take a look at the site with it when I get a chance.

Oh...does anyone know how to fix the extra spaces between text blocks? I hate the fact that three short paragraphs cover half a page and seem completely disjointed. :(

Not sure why your stylesheets are not being used in Firefox, but the spacing is a fundamental HTML issue due to using an HTML editor that put padding in, whether you asked for it or not I don't know:

<!--bof Product description -->
<div id="productDescription" class="productGeneral biggerText"><p style="padding: 1.5em; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><font face="verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif">These are black glass buttons with an abstract double spiral or pinwheel design
``` Strip the garbage out of the description and you will get rid of the extra spacing.

The extra padding just keeps showing up. It must be somewhere in my style sheet or in the code for the board overall.

I had the problem before I installed the html editor; I installed it thinking it would help get rid of the issue, but it did not.

The pages look fine in preview; it's only the finished posts that have the issues. And they appear that way even if I compose it in notepad and then paste the plain text.

The padding I highlighted is inline in your description text, not in any stylesheet. You may need to use the plaintext description entry box to avoid having padding automatically inserted.

My Firefox CSS error log says you have a missing } at the end of a rule on line 265 of your stylesheet.css. I can't find that line because none of the tools will display far enough with line numbers - something makes it cut off.

The W3C CSS validator has different complaints:

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?profile=css21&warning=0&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fyourbuttonshop.com%2Findex.php%3Fmain_page%3Dproduct_info%26cPath%3D33_35%26products_id%3D526