NEVER MIND! I thought I'd thoroughly investigated the stylesheets we're using, but the problem turned out to be an imported stylesheet that was putting extra padding around these rich text tags...please ignore this entry.
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Apologies if this has been asked and answered previously; I've hunted around and not found a solution to this issue.
In our implementation, when text is bolded or italicized in the WYSIWYG view of CKEditor, an extra space appears before and after the highlighted text. For example, if an author bolds the middle word in this string:
A sample sentence
The WYSIWYG view changes to something like this:
A sample sentence.
i.e. an extra wide space appears before and after the word. Authors typically think an extra space has been added, so they erase the space between the normal and bold text. In the WYSIWYG view it LOOKS correct, but the html output is actually this:
<p>A<strong>sample</strong>sentence.</p>
Is there a configuration setting that would prevent this behavior?