Using the form to enable users to submit content

No problem to do this with Gravity Forms. Here is an example form:
http://guitar.chrishajer.com/submit-a-recipe/

Here are two example recipes I submitted:
http://guitar.chrishajer.com/category/recipes/

You just need a some text to your content template for the post body. Here is the content template I used for the post body to achieve this:

{Photo of the result:4:medium:left}
<p><strong>Ingredients:</strong></p>
<p>{Ingredients:3}</p><br style="clear:both;" />
<strong>How to make it</strong>
<p>{Method:5}</p>

That takes the submitted photo, uses the medium size and floats it left (top left corner of the post.)

Then creates a paragraph and uses what was submitted as "ingredients" there.

Finally, I use the "method" in another paragraph.

The text you would need to add to appear with the submitted information is "How to make it" (you wanted "method") and "Ingredients:". The magic is all in the content template. Play around with your form and have fun with your submissions.

You can have only one post body field. In my form, the "Method" is the post body. The other required post field is the Title. And I used a third post field for the image.

But the ingredients field is not a post field at all. It's just paragraph text (a normal field). Save the form after adding all your fields, then go back to the post body field (method) and check "Use content template". Then, there will be a drop down with ALL your form fields available to insert into the post body. Anything that is submitted with the form is available for you to put in the post body.

So, there are a few fields inserted from the drop down into the content template ({Photo of the result:4:medium:left}, {Ingredients:3}, {Method:5}). Then, in the content template, you add whatever words or formatting you want to surround the submitted content. In my case, I added some paragraph tags, and <strong>Ingredients:</strong> and `<strong>How to make it</strong>
`

The content template is a combination of content submitted with the form, and the additional text and markup you want to be present on every post created by a submission.

I thought all your fields were required though?

I don't know if there's a way in the content template to say If no ingredients are submitted, don't show the "Ingredients" heading. Is that what you're trying to do? To prevent the problem of a section of the post being blank (just a title, no content)?

You could probably do it differently by using custom fields and then modifying your post template (or creating a post template for recipes specifically) but it's more complicated than what we've accomplished here. It can be done though.

To answer the original question, you would apply the wpautop function using the gform_post_data hook, documented here:

http://www.gravityhelp.com/documentation/page/Gform_post_data

However, my understanding of the wpautop function makes me think it would not help in this case. If the text you pasted in DID have blank lines between carriage returns, then it would convert those to paragraphs rather than two br tags the way it's done now. That might be more correct semantically, but it doesn't solve your problem. The input text from the Fox News article just has a new line at the end of each paragraph, not a blank line in between paragraphs, at least when I pasted it into a text editor.

A lot of this is going to depend on where it's being copied and pasted from.

Thank you for the update. Good luck.