After some additional online research, I found someone that had a solution to the problem, sort of. It’s a bit extra work for me, but thankfully I don’t use the form on that many pages.
Basically, it’s the content formatting that is happening on the_content. So, I added a shortcode function to my theme that I can call in any post I need to remove the default formatting to get around the extra line breaks.
Here’s the code I’m using
add_shortcode('xko_fix_formatting', 'xko_fix_formatting');
function xko_fix_formatting( $atts, $content = '' ) {
remove_filter('the_content', 'my_formatter', 99);
extract(shortcode_atts(array(), $atts));
$output = '';
return $output;
}
Of course, that does remove ALL formatting, so on those pages I just switched over to html and added back what I needed.
This way, I only have to remove the formatting on those pages where I have the contact form, and can control it as I need to.
It’s kind of brute force, but it might give you a clue about what is conflicting with Gravity Forms. But it works fine for what I needed on those three pages, so I’m all good :-)