diff --git a/system/config/system.yaml b/system/config/system.yaml
index ead9bf100..a7c1ada23 100644
--- a/system/config/system.yaml
+++ b/system/config/system.yaml
@@ -22,7 +22,7 @@ pages:
     twig: true                         # Enable twig level events
   markdown:
     extra: false                       # Enable support for Markdown Extra support (GFM by default)
-    auto_line_breaks: true             # Enable automatic line breaks
+    auto_line_breaks: false            # Enable automatic line breaks
     auto_url_links: false              # Enable automatic HTML links
     escape_markup: false               # Escape markup tags into entities
     special_chars:                     # List of special characters to automatically convert to entities
diff --git a/system/src/Grav/Common/Page/Page.php b/system/src/Grav/Common/Page/Page.php
index 0c5bc4a89..feeb449a8 100644
--- a/system/src/Grav/Common/Page/Page.php
+++ b/system/src/Grav/Common/Page/Page.php
@@ -430,9 +430,9 @@ class Page
         }
 
         $parsedown->setBreaksEnabled($defaults['auto_line_breaks']);
-        $parsedown->setSpecialChars($defaults['special_chars']);
         $parsedown->setUrlsLinked($defaults['auto_url_links']);
         $parsedown->setMarkupEscaped($defaults['escape_markup']);
+        $parsedown->setSpecialChars($defaults['special_chars']);
 
         $this->content = $parsedown->text($this->content);
     }