Ask MetaFilter posts tagged with wysiwyg

WYSIWY.... - wait, you want what?

jmnugent — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:48:23 -0800

My employer is searching for an end-user friendly, drag-n-drop, WYSIWYG webpage editor that is neither a CMS or a web hosting panel. Does something like this exist? I think my employer is asking for the impossible, but I'm trying anyways. Can anyone suggest solutions to solve the following requirements:

1.) A very simple/basic drag-n-drop WYSIWYG web page editor for small "mom/pop businesses" that might only need less than 5 static web pages (doesnt need to handle dynamic / complex content)

2.) Is an online (server side) editor (NOT an application the user has to download or configure). We need it to be drop dead stupid simple to use.

3.) Wont require much (if any) support on our backend. (in a perfect world, the ideal solution would be some kind of a PHP script we can automate the installation when a customer calls up to have the service activated.) (for the record, our backend is mostly FreeBSD and Apache with a minor amount of Windows IIS)

4.) Not a CMS or Hosting Control Panel (cPanel/Plesk). Those things are overkill for our needs. We are primarily an ISP, not a hosting company. (unless you can make a good argument for a hosting control panel)

The closest thing I've found (from searching past AskMe's) is Flyspeck , unfortunately their website appears to be "down" at the moment. Its a clean simple PHP script that is only $200-ish for unlimited license. Problem is its functionality is almost to basic. (its not "drag-n-drop" enough)

Other than that. I'm kinda coming up short. It seems like the industry has really moved away from simple editors and towards CMS/Hosting Panels. I'd love to recommend to my company to tweak our backend to support installs of Wordpress/Drupal, but they seem reluctant to consider that as a viable option. ("Our target customer for this project isnt savvy enough to handle a CMS" - and - "we dont want to burden our web dev or support team to have to support CMS questions that might come up.")

Its frustrating me because its kinda like that old joke. "For technical solutions , your options are: "Fast", "Cheap" or "easy" but you can only pick 2. (and my company wants all 3)

Help me find a website (non CMS/Blog) program/tool for my wife.

Leenie — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 01:31:15 -0800

My wife and I have a small family farm. While I run a few websites that are hand coded, Wordpress or Joomla based, with galleries and more, she can not handle that. We are trying to find a simple website creation program for her to maintain the farms website.

The one we are testing and it almost what we need is 'Website Baker'. It is a PHP web application that is somewhat WYSIWYG. The big gripe we have is image handling. If we have a large photo from a camera and want to place it on the website, it can not create thumbnails or a browser friendly size. You have to upload the images before you can use them on the page, etc. You can not have images float on the page to the right or left of the page, they have to be within a paragraph break.

We don't need commenting, blogging, ratings, voting or anything like that. We are looking for software that will let her create the website, a professional non crap looking page. I can do the templating, that is not the problem.

The software needs to be able to create a static page for an animal. That page will contain its recent genetics along with a few paragraphs about the animal. Photographs are required on the pages.

If the menu system can support sub pages/categories, that is great.
Example:
Breed 1
Animal 1
Animal 2
Animal 3
Breed 2
Animal 1
Animal 2

Nvu, Frontpage, Dreamweaver, etc. are not an option. Web based apps get bonus points. It will be on a Linux server running Apache web server with MySQL and all of the usual stuff.

Thanks for any, and I mean any, suggestions.

Images, WYSIWYG and Drupal

Blazecock Pileon — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 22:53:45 -0800

Trying to get TinyMCE, IMCE and Drupal working together to post inline images... Problem

For some reason, while the TinyMCE toolbar shows up and I can insert an image into the textarea, the image does not appear in the previewed or submitted post.

For example, in this page, there should be the following image in between the bulleted list and the text "More test text!". This image appears in the textarea when editing the page. When I preview or submit, the image does not appear in the article.

Details

I'm running Drupal 5.1, PHP 5.2.2, and Apache 1.3.33.

I added the TinyMCE module, TinyMCE 2.1.2, and IMCE.

I enabled image uploading in Administer > Site Configuration > IMCE

Options?

Is there a way to get HTMLArea/Xinha or another WYSIWYG module for Drupal to work with Safari, such that images can be inserted into an article?

Best Standalone Javascript WYSIWYG HTML Layout Editor?

judge.mentok.the.mindtaker — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 15:16:37 -0800

In legacy code land, noone can hear you scream. I'm a web developer and I need a standalone, drop in wysiwyg html editor, preferably something all in JS (like Dojo's Rich Text Editor, but for actual layout with tables etc.) The background is: I need to provide a client with a reasonably featured wysiwyg HTML editor.
I want something LIKE the wysiwyg editor for pages/posts in WordPress BUT the solution needs to be standalone.
We have an existing home-brew system content system, and we're only giving control of the index over to the client, so this shouldn't do anything other than edit a single doc / record etc. How we get the data to and from is irrelevant, I'll hook up the editor whatever what is necessary.

Basically, what is the best (preferably FREE) drop in javascript HTML editor. Something that we can just post the result as a form (again like the way Dojo hijacks a TEXTAREA).

As you can imagine, I looked into Dojo, but only found TEXT editors. If someone knows of a Dojo Rich Layout Editor, that would sure work too!

TIA all.

What can a Linux fan use for consistent note taking and archival?

a007r — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 16:35:46 -0800

I am studying in human science (psychology), and I'm starting university next month. I have been using a laptop running Linux to take notes and write assignments during the past two years or so, but I feel my current technique for note taking is unsatisfactory. My current method is this: fire up OpenOffice Writer with a blank document, start typing in bullet-list form, with a Heading1 title at the top of the document, and save the document as "yyyy-mm-dd-topic.odt" in a folder such as school/the_subject/*. Whenever a semester is over, I compress the files into a tar.gz archive and put it in an archival folder. This prevents me from having the files indexed by Tracker.

- must have: formatting controlled by a central/GLOBAL STYLESHEET, unicode, open source, runs on Linux
- nice to have: OpenDocument, drawing support, autosave, wysiwyg, ability to zoom text to disproportionate sizes (those 1280x1024 widescreen laptops strain the eyes easily)
- don't care about: spellcheck
- don't want: proprietary stuff, obscure file format, latex, a database

I have been scratching my head over this for a little while, so far I see these options: OpenOffice, plain text with Gedit or whatever, Abiword, coding XHTML by hand on the fly, using Tomboy (but it is slow), using a wiki such as PmWiki running on a local server on this laptop, none of which particularily seem to fill my needs completely. Please let me know of any other possibilities I have overlooked!

Latex (even Wyneken) are beyond my understanding, and I feel they are overkill for note taking (maybe when I end up writing a huge thesis or something...)

I want everything I write to be accessible 20 years later. Actually, I have only two big criticisms against my current OpenOffice technique: it forces me to load openoffice (which does "feel" heavier than most text processors), and the contents' style is per-document, not system-wide (like in a CSSed page collection or in Latex).
A criticism I have against PmWiki (the only wiki I tested, but it uses no database, and that is nice) is that filenames it creates don't really support non-english characters properly, and I have to concede that is a limitation of the web itself; accents mess up nicely in URLs, and pmWiki doesn't like to have them on the filesystem either; actually, the problem may lie in the fact that it feels like I have "less control" over the filesystem since it uses all those WikiWordFileNamesThings. Furthermore, editing in a wiki is not exactly WYSIWYG. You have a very easy syntax, and it has the advantage to use CSS over all your documents at once, but you cannot "visually" distinguish a header paragraph from a regular paragraph, not as easily as you would in a WYSIWYG application (you have to save to do that). Printing is also a bit tricky, and a wiki is, to a certain extent, a bit of annoying maintenance to deal with (security upgrades for example).

I like solutions that "respect" my filesystem instead of forcing me into a set style of folders, or worse, a database; I backup and synchronize notes between my laptop and my desktop over the network using Rsync scripts I wrote.

I am "more inclined" towards certain file formats so far: OpenDocument or xhtml, but feel free to suggest something else. I mean I don't quite like RTF, but if it's guaranteed to work everywhere anytime, it could be useful; or even taking notes in plain text in front of a laptop without X.org would be possible (but pretty friggin radical! :).

Actually, I'm realizing that I'm typing this in Gedit, a plain text / code editor, but that's only because I do not trust the Web (even if my browser never crashed) and don't want to lose a long post.

Thoughts? Experiences? Recommendations? Questions? :) I realize there *is* note-taking software out there such as Gournal or Jarnal if I remember correctly, but are those really the end all solution? A computer certainly does not behave like a physical paper notebook, and I'm especially interested in the "way" (or maybe the medium) the notes are taken in (if you have special techniques, I'm also interested), not really specific applications. I know this is a weird question, I will try clarifying as soon as possible if you have needs for clarification.

HTML editor

moochoo — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 05:26:04 -0800

Simple HTML editor needed. Im after a very simple HTML editor with a few requirements.

1] Must be free
2] Reasonably well documented help system
3] WYSIWYG

Its for a class of children ranging from 13-16. The software will be delivered by a teacher who has very limited knowledge of creating websites. so the software needs to be easy enough for her to pickup, then teach the class.

Wither WYSIWYG Wiki Writing?

anildash — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 11:12:41 -0800

Does anybody know of a one-page WYSIWYG wiki application? It shouldn't be too difficult to create one, of course, but I'm hoping it already exists. Here's what I need: No ability to create new pages using WikiWords, a WYSIWYG or edit-in-place UI that lets anyone edit the content on the page, the ability to easily customize the layout to be very simple, the ability to roll back edits, and an easy environment for running it on my own server in PHP or Perl.

Here's what I don't want: to "just remove features from MediaWiki", or "can't you use Writely/Google Notebook/etc. for this"?, the need to get a web host that supports Ruby on Rails, anything that doesn't also work in IE.

Nice to have: some sort of authentication for edits, a pretty UI or template by default, a good community of other users who are building on the app as well.

Basically, I want to be able to have people collaborate on creating a single document without having to know HTML or (worse) a proprietary wiki markup language, without having to install anything, and without all the cruft that makes wikis so complicated.

How to get colors consistant on monitor/printer/scanner?

Alpenglow — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 09:45:10 -0800

I need to be able to print/view & scan colors accurately. What is the best way to go about setting up color profiles for multiple printers, a scanner & a monitor for the best "wysiwyg"? I have a ViewSonic monitor, a HP Scanjet 7400c scanner, an Epson Photo 2200 inkjet, and a HP 8500 laser. My job requires me to scan & print, and the color never matches. Where do I start? I'm somewhat familiar with profiles, I'm on a PC, and I print mostly from Photoshop.

Good WYSIWYG web development software for the Mac?

brokekid — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 17:19:45 -0800

I'm looking for very simple WYSIWYG web development software package like JAlbum, Freeway and RapidWeaver. Are there more packages out there that are very similar and very good for the Mac? I do a lot of web design work probono for friends, family and some non-profit. I am looking for software that I can try out to cut my time down even more. Freeway, JAlbum and RapidWeaver are good, but they each are lacking in their own way. Any ideas?

Tools for writing application documentation

turbodog — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 11:53:45 -0800

For the purpose of documentating an application, I'm looking for a WYSIWYG editor that can yield both in HTML and PDF formats, but meets a few other criteria. [More Inside] Criteria:
- Need WYSIWYG: don't want to muck with HTML across a large document
- Need HTML: organized and hyperlinked from a table of contents at the top, so it can be read "top down" or as in-program documentation by linking to the appropriate page.
- Need PDF: shouldn't be a big issue since I can probably render PDF from whatever HTML I end up with.
- Need automatic TOC generation/upkeep that links to the referenced item
- Nice to have: automatically include a link back to the TOC at the end of each section. If I had to do this by hand it wouldn't be the end of the world.

What I already considered:
- Word: WYSIWYG, does the TOC the way I'd like, but really afraid of the HTML it would generate
- Open Office: WYSIWYG, does TOCs but doesn't link to the referenced location, HTML hopefully sucks less than Word's
- Generic WYSIWYG HTML tools: don't automatically do a TOC

Any ideas on other tools I could check out? Free/open source solutions a big plus.

Question number 14192

noius — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 11:58:34 -0800

Free-WYSIWYG-HTML-editor-Filter: what is the best one, if indeed there exists one worth using? (My search of AskMe gave me nothing on this...)