Line breaks in WordPress

Usually I use LiveWriter to post/edit blog posts, but occasionally I have to revert to doing things in the horrible WordPress editor.

One annoying thing about this editor is that it removes your line breaks. For example, suppose you're in a list and you do a couple of shift-returns to add a new paragraph within the same point in the list (i.e. an indented paragraph that's not numbered). WordPress will remove the <br/> tags and close up the space. This might not happen straight away but it will happen if you reopen the post in the editor.

Even if you go into code view and manually type in <br/>, WordPress will take them out. It seems to think it knows better. So you have to prevent it recognising the <br/> tags by entering them manually in code view as:

<br align="left" />