Dawn theme: why don't paragraph breaks always render?

Store Design

Topic summary

A user reports that double line breaks in product descriptions don’t render properly on their published Shopify store using the Dawn theme. The paragraph breaks appear correctly in the editor but collapse into single lines on the live site.

Suggested solutions include:

  • Using the Rich Text Editor to prevent formatting issues
  • Manually inserting HTML <p> tags for paragraph breaks
  • Adding custom CSS to force proper spacing:
.product__description p {
    margin-bottom: 16px;
    display: block;
}

The issue appears to be a recurring formatting problem specific to the Dawn theme’s product description rendering. No definitive cause has been identified, but the workarounds focus on either manual HTML control or CSS overrides to ensure proper paragraph spacing.

Summarized with AI on October 30. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

Hi all.

I have this continuous problem with Dawn theme whereby I’ll do a double line break, such as this…

… but the break won’t show up on the published store, and will instead show like this:

'I have this continuous problem with Dawn theme whereby I’ll do a paragraph break, such as this…

but the break won’t show up on the published store, and will instead show like this.’

This frequently happens in the product page description. Is there any known quick fix to this?

2

Hi,

Hope this will help

  • Use Rich Text Editor to avoid formatting issues.
  • Use html tag

    manually

  • Modify CSS if breaks still don’t work.

CSS code example

.product__description p {
    margin-bottom: 16px; /* Adjust spacing as needed */
    display: block;
}