In Elegant Themes, like many other themes, the line break <br /> br tags were not being preserved when used within shortcodes.

For example, we have a page with tabs using shortcode [tab][/tab] and we wanted to use Shift+Enter to enter line breaks.

Although  the content looked fine in the Editor, the line breaks were getting stripped and didn’t display properly in the front-end.

Elegant Themes suggested we tell our client to add <br class=”clear” /> which is not exactly… elegant for our clients.

You could also add a line break shortcode so that the client could add [br] but this is almost as annoying.

I tried the Advanced TinyMCE plugin  because there is an option to “stop removing the <p> and <br /> tags when saving and show them in the HTML editor” but that didn’t work.

Finally, after lots of searching, I found this snippet in the WP Forum to add to your functions.php file.

Oh Happy Day!