I am going mad. I have spent countless hours trying to work this out. If anyone can help me, I would be so grateful.

I used to be able to change the text color in my posts by highlighting the text in question and clicking the "select text color" drop down menu with the colored squares in the visual tab of "edit post" - this would change my text to the color I select (and when I clicked on the HTML tab I would see the corresponding HTML code such as <span style="color: #33cccc;"> for the color blue for example)

Now, for some bizarre reason, when I select the text I want to color and click the "select text color" on the visual tab, it is actually my text font that changes instead and the code I see in the HTM tab is this:
<span style="font-family: mceinline;">...</span> instead of <span style="color: #33cccc;"
this happens no matter what color I choose!

And to make things even more confusing, sometimes (but not always), a random part of my post which is NOT the text I highlighted gets colored in the color I selected.

So now, I have to manually color the desired text in my post using the HTML tab instead of the visual tab...which is such a nightmare because I am so incompetent at that sort of stuff!

Is this making sense to anyone? please help me!

Do I have a bug somewhere?
thanks - Dee

Mine works as you say it should. Maybe you have a plugin issue.

Hi Larry, what is a "plugin issue" (sorry, am not that technical)? and how can I find out if this is the problem and how to resolve it?
thank you
Dee

What I do is disable all the plugins and see if the problem remains. If it doesn't I reactivate the plugins one at a time to see when the problem comes back.

Hi Larry,
I don't seem to have any plugins because when I go to "manage plugins", there aren't any being displayed there apart from 2 which are inactive (it's called akismet)
so if I have no plugins, they can't be causing the problem right?

That's correct. What version of WordPress and Atahualpa?

have you been making any changes in the stylesheet? Because that can have a pretty profound effect like your describing. Do you have a copy of the stylesheet that you've been using that you can try to reload after making a copy of your current style sheet? Larry is correct, though you need to change one thing at a time and see if that fixes it. Something has changed in the code. Do you know all the changes you've been making?

Hi, I am using WP 2.7.1 and Atahualpa 3.2

Is the style sheet you refer to the tab called "post/page styling" found in ATO?
or is there a style sheet elsewhere?

It's hard to know what to tell you as you have older version of WP and Atahualpa. Is there a reason you haven't upgraded?

If you do decide to upgrade make sure you only do one thing at a time and DON'T use the auto upgrade option for Atahualpa. Look through these forums for suggested upgrade procedures.

Do you mean hitting "reset settings" on the "post/page styling" page?
I could copy that page, reset it, and reload it all over again. Would that work?

Any other thoughts? the "select color" is one of the features I use the most in the visual editor and it is such a nightmare not having it. I appreciate any feedback from you guys!

Hey Larry,
I haven't upgraded because I am not sore how to do it.
I tried finding some information on the best way to upgrade WP and the theme I am using (and which I should upgrade first) but I got very intimidated with the information out there and was worried of messing up my blogs.

You don't have to "Reset Settings". Just check what you have in CSS Inserts.

I don't have anything in CSS inserts.
all the boxes are set to default: blank.