WYSIWYG Plugin (again)

@Rob_Nicholson what I did to get around the issue was remove the buttons toolbar, and remove the preview on the right. Then I centered the editor, made the preview pane optional (it opens on top of the editor on click. The only buttons I needed were the Emoji and the Upload Picture buttons, which I added at the extreme right, making it similar to a phone UI. Most people will just write unformatted text, and for now this should suit you fine.

In a few months, one of us will get around to making a plugin for wysiwyg, so I guess we just have to be patient.

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Yeah, you can just hide all the formatting buttons with CSS. The only issue comes when people use markdown by accident and wonder why they don’t Get What They Saw.

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That is indeed a very convient way to do it. Shame having that in the parser makes it hard to start reponse with year period. Like “When did you start hating Markdown? \n\n 2014. That’s when I started actually using Markdown.”

Another “problem” is typing #1 at the start of a line

#1 which turns it into this

Try explaining “escape codes” to a non-technical user…

I suppose this summarises my reservations about a markdown editor - normal users don’t expect something weird to happen when they type a letter. if they press “#” then they expect “#” to appear on the screen - always.

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Being able to disable markdown within comments would be a start - although in my view the original post content itself still needs the ability to add H1, H2, bold etc.

I was originally hopeful, but after considerable research I very much doubt that there is much appetite for this to be developed by third party developers, not least because of the ongoing maintenance issues associated with third party plugins. And if maintenance isn’t proactive, imagine building up your community and then upgrading to an essential release only to find most of your existing posts are ill formatted.

Here’s Sam’s view on the scope of the problem from Who would prefer a standard wysiwyg to markdown?:

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Yes, I’d prefer a solution to be part of the core software as it’s an important part of the overall system from an end-user point of view. They will spend most time reading posts, then navigating and then writing posts themselves.

I am closing this topic, sorry.

From

Let us discuss the technical implementation of WYSIWYG

It has become

Welcome to festivus, time to air our grievance

Flag to reopen after festivus is over.

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