[ARCHIVED] Text/layout crowding in Canvas LMS

[ccorbett]

Hopefully someone here can help me.  No matter which browser I use (macOS) -with all extensions off- I am seeing what I call 'crowding' in most/all screens on Canvas.  I've attached and highlighted one such instance in the Discussion Board.  

Anyone else experience this and have a solution!?

[Chris_Hofer · Accepted solution]

Hello again, @ccorbett ...

If the issue is happening in other places as well, do you know if your school's local Canvas administrator or someone from your school's Online Learning team added some custom code to the overall environment that would cause issues like this?  You might want to have a conversation with those folks (if you haven't already) to see if they could pinpoint anything for you.  Another question...I know you said you have tried multiple browsers on macOS.  Have you tried looking at these same pages on a PC to see if the overlapping is seen there, too?  Just trying to narrow down some other possibilities for you.  Hope this will help.

[Chris_Hofer]

Good afternoon, @ccorbett ...

Wow, that's super strange!  By chance, have you looked at the HTML for that text on your page to see if you can find anything that might be causing the overlapping?  It might be there is some rogue HTML code on the page that is causing this, and maybe there are some things that can be cleaned up.  It looks like, for the most part, there's nothing too out of the ordinary about the text you have for that discussion topic.  It looks like you're using some basic text formatting at times such as underlining and maybe even a text heading (or is "Week 4 Discussion" your discussion topic title?  It's hard to tell.).

Back in December of 2018, I wrote a short blog post here in the Community called: HTML Cleanup.  You might want to check it out, give it a try, and see if the steps I've outlined in that post help to fix the issues you are experiencing in your own discussion topic.  You could also paste in the cleaned up code into a new discussion topic (separate from the one in question) that isn't yet published...so that you can make sure that things are working correctly before you make it "live" to your students.

Please keep us posted on this...and hopefully a little massaging of your HTML code will be the answer to this.  Take care, stay safe, and be well.

[ccorbett]

Thank you for the considerate response. I've looked at the HTML and so on before, when this first started happening. Weirder still, it happens in Files too, not just in Discussion.  I am at a loss, but I definitely appreciate the response and I'm wide open to all suggestions. 

[Chris_Hofer · Accepted solution]

Hello again, @ccorbett ...

If the issue is happening in other places as well, do you know if your school's local Canvas administrator or someone from your school's Online Learning team added some custom code to the overall environment that would cause issues like this?  You might want to have a conversation with those folks (if you haven't already) to see if they could pinpoint anything for you.  Another question...I know you said you have tried multiple browsers on macOS.  Have you tried looking at these same pages on a PC to see if the overlapping is seen there, too?  Just trying to narrow down some other possibilities for you.  Hope this will help.

[ccorbett · Accepted solution]

After more root cause analysis I was able to narrow down the cause to an ad-blocker. Funny, there are no ads or trackers on our Canvas LMS, but something about the page code is caught up in that net.  Thanks for the suggestions and I hope if someone reads this and has the same situation, they will be helped by it!