@Saragrace-Knauf said in Question about LF and <br>:
What am I not understanding?
Probably that a plain text editor (like Notepad++), the editor in WordPress, and HTML (what’s ultimately sent to a web browser to display as a web page) all have different conventions.
I haven’t used WordPress, but it’s likely that the editor you use to create your pages there has its own conventions about how to interpret line-ending signals. From what you’ve written, I think you might be copying from HTML, editing in Notepad++, then copying to and saving from WordPress. To do that successfully, you’d need to understand how each of those three manages line endings.
Notepad++ interprets CR, LF or CRLF in sequence as a line break. In the status bar at the bottom, you’ll see Windows (CR LF), Unix (LF) or Macintoch (CR); that tells you what Notepad++ will insert when you press the Enter key. (There are also a few operations that will not work correctly unless all the line endings in your file match whatever is set there.) You can right-click that to get a menu to change all line endings to a different one of the three choices. It is almost never a good idea to have mixed line ending types in the same file, or to have what’s in the file be different from what is shown in the status bar. (If you have mixed endings but what is shown is already what you want them all to be, just switch to something else and then switch back.)
HTML mostly ignores CR and LF. (There are exceptions in certain contexts, such as within <pre></pre> tags.) Most often you allow the browser to determine where line breaks should occur within paragraphs, and use tags like <p></p> or <div></div> to separate blocks of text. The <br> tag is used when you want to force a line break within a block (rather than, say, starting a new paragraph). Unless you know why you need to do that, don’t; use <p></p> tags to separate paragraphs, and let the reader’s browser work out where to break lines within paragraphs.
Finally, I don’t know how the WordPress editor works, but it probably has its own conventions. You’d need to learn about those from WordPress documentation, forums and support.
Edit to add: One other thing. If you’re just adding line endings in Notepad++ because you can’t read the paragraphs because they stretch way past the right edge of the window, turn on View | Word wrap.
