Way to disable block auto-conversion?

  • On a site for a magazine, articles frequently have endnotes that start with “1. “, “2. “, etc., but they need to be paragraph blocks with a specific CSS class to style them. If I paste in a whole article with the endnotes at the end, WordPress leaves them as paragraph blocks, but if I copy just an endnote into an empty paragraph block, the editor automatically changes it to a list block. If I change it back to a paragraph block, the number disappears, and if I try to type in the “1. ” again, it changes to a list block again! I have to retype the number, period, and space in some weird order to get the editor to leave it alone.

    For this site, I don’t want the auto-conversion behavior at all, as I’m copying from HTML with tags already the way I want the blocks to be. (InDesign has wonderful abilities to export to HTML with specified tags for each style in the document – it works great for getting from InDesign to WordPress.) Is there a way to stop the WordPress editor from changing things on a whim? Or at least ask my permission before doing it?

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  • I have an idea how you can stop the conversion to certain blocks: disable the blocks you don’t want to use. To do this, go to Gutenberg and click on the 3 dots in the upper right corner, then on Preferences. There you will find a list of blocks under Blocks and you can disable the ones you don’t want to use. After that there should be no automatic conversion to them.

    If this is not enough, you might have to submit your request to Gutenberg itself: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues

    Thread Starter OsakaWebbie

    (@osakawebbie)

    I have an idea how you can stop the conversion to certain blocks: disable the blocks you don’t want to use.

    Thanks for trying, but this is not a solution – I use list blocks all the time (when I choose to do so, not when WP tries to guess what I want). This would be like turning off the water main because the bathroom faucet drips.

    If this is not enough, you might have to submit your request…

    Are you saying there is no way to turn off auto-conversion? I just want to confirm that there’s no way to just solve this, without asking for new feature development.

    I am not aware of any way to do this. The Gutenberg developers will probably be able to tell you faster. Maybe it is already on some to-do list.

    Thread Starter OsakaWebbie

    (@osakawebbie)

    Bummer. Okay, I submitted a feature request. In case others with the same frustration find this thread, here is the link: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/44240

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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