Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with wysiwyg

Is there a true WYSIWYG Wordpress Editor?

aburd — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 19:24:57 -0800

My wife has been forced to update and maintain her company blog. She is trying to create posts using the default online editor. I am watching her breakdown on a weekly basis while dealing with this. She hits backspace on a paragraph and the paragraph jumps to inside the caption box of the previous image. She creates a post, hits preview and nothing is even similar to what she was trying to create; text that was wrapping around an image is suddenly all messed up, weird breaks appear in paragraphs, Large blank spaces appear on the page. She has no experience with coding so getting her to actually code the post is tough. Is there an easy solution? I want to help her make her life easier.

How to enable the WYSIWYG editor in Joomla...?

KokuRyu — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 16:29:21 -0800

How to enable the WYSIWYG editor in Joomla...? I'm a board member on a tiny non-profit, and I administer the website, which uses a Joomla - CMS.

We were recently hacked, and the website was hacked. We were able to restore with a backup, which is great.

However, the WYSIWYG editor appears to be gone from the article manager (or whatever the hell you call it in Joomla). After doing some searching, I discovered that WYSIWYG is non-native in Joomla, and you need a plugin to enable it.

Or do you? I'm used to using Wordpress and Drupla, which come with basic WYSIWYG editors for pages and posts. For example, in WP, all you have to do is switch between the "visual" and "html" tabs.

I looked for a similar button or whatever even the article editor in Joomla, but couldn't find it.

Am I missing something obvious? Or do I have to somehow install a plugin in Joomla? The previous admin has left the board and is studying at medical school, so I can't really bug him too much.

I'm considering using Wordpress to just rebuild the website from scratch, but that will take about 10 hours which I don't have right now.

Any Joomla tips would be appreciated!

WYSIWYG up my e-newsletter!

peanut_mcgillicuty — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 10:12:28 -0800

Looking for an e-newsletter template! I've been tasked with finding a better way of managing our weekly corporate newsletter, but nothing I've googled has met all my needs.

The current system involves three people, Word and text files, Dreamweaver and the backend of our outdated website, and takes up most of a day to complete. None of the people working on the newsletter have much coding experience and we have been told that the process takes too long (not to mention that if one of these people is out on newsletter day, the entire system gets thrown out of whack pretty badly). If this is the best way of doing it, let me know and I'll pass that back up the chain as well.

The newsletter consists of text, images, and links. No video. I'm not sure if I'm looking for a software package or what.

What I need:
- Professional looking template that can be updated with a new header and color scheme each week
- The template must have a left-hand sidebar
- WYSIWYG editor that spits out HTML code (ideally, pasting from Word would spit out HTML that needs minimal clean-up). Drag and drop would be awesome.

What I do NOT need:
- a full service solution. I don't need audience management, emailing service, or reporting and analytics. It's fine if they are included but only if I'm able to export the HTML and use it in the service my company already uses.

Budget is ideally less than $1,000. Thanks in advance!

Power-theming Tumblr tool?

mumblingmynah — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 22:59:18 -0800

Is there a better way to create Tumblr themes than using the "Customize Theme" window? Specifically, what I'd like to do is use a desktop text editor and be able to preview changes to the theme layout offline instead of in the browser window. Is there some application or plugin (for Dreamweaver or similar) that will make this possible? Mac/PC agnostic. All said program would have to do is substitute suitable placeholders for the custom tags that Tumblr uses. It seems to me that this should be a thing.

It feels unbearably clunky to me to edit the theme in the browser window, and I can't imagine everyone puts up with doing it this way. So how do I make the process more workable?

Dealing with Wordpress and Web-based WYSIWYGs

yeahyeahyeahwhoo — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 09:02:14 -0800

Does anyone have any tips for dealing with less savvy users of web-based WYSIWYG products like TinyMCE (which Wordpress uses) and/or improving the usability on the back-end? The best users I've worked with seem to universally use the HTML editor, while the rest fight with the visual editor to varying degrees of success. I know the number one problem is formatted cut+pasting from word and websites, but even once some of these users get past that, issues still crop up. Any tips, or good low level documentation that someone has seen would be appreciated.

If you give a mouse a cookie... (WYSIWYG Gone Wrong)

Anonymous — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 10:36:48 -0800

I designed the website, installed a WYSIWYG editor for my client to update the text, and now the site looks terrible. What should I do? This is for a client who is also an old friend, and I had to nudge him from the beginning - he was used to the old design, though the site hadn't been redesigned in about ten years and was a terrible face for his organization. Eventually we settled on a design that made him happy, and was also modernized and pretty (and a price that was a better deal than I probably should've agreed to). I installed Wordpress and configured it to allow him to edit the text/images and add pages/links.

However, now that I've "handed over the reigns", the site is looking worse and worse. In a single page he'll use every possible text color and font size; bold, italics, and underline everywhere; and a mish-mash of left-, center- and right-aligned text.

I don't know that there's much to be done, but I'm curious what you MeFites think... Is it worth gently pointing out that some of his changes go outside of common web practice? Should I just know not to give clients a WYSIWYG editor in the future without agreeing upon a text "house style" first? How do other designers/developers deal with this? (I'll admit I'm somewhat new at doing design work professionally; feel free to tell me I never should've taken this job, if that's what you think.) Thanks for your thoughts.

Throwaway email: wysiwyggonewrong@gmail.com

Editing a resume when WYSIWYG doesn't work

Net Prophet — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 10:02:07 -0800

I can't see my computer screen, and I want to be able to edit my resume. What Windows-based software would let me control the layout of text on a page without having to look at it? I'm blind, so I use my computer with screen reading software called JAWS for Windows. It's good at reading text out loud, but not so good at saying how the text is formatted, what fonts are being used, and all those visual things. Essentially, if it isn't actual text on the screen, I don't hear about it.

For editing my resume, what I'd like is some sort of program that lets me enter text into fields, and then does the formatting of the text for me. Failing that, some sort of text editor which has an option to display the formatting codes on screen -- something like how they are in html, but with enough formatting options to make a flashy resume.

I've looked at Easy Resume Creator Pro, which seemed like it might be just what I need, except it wasn't designed with accessibility in mind. I can't tab from one field to the next using the keyboard, for example.

Please give me suggestions.

Does anybody use a database program for their resume? Maybe something like that would let me apply formatting rules to fields of a particular type. Or, because web browsers are accessible with speech, some sort of html form that lets you enter data about your work history and generates a nicely formatted resume from it could work also.

I'm all ears.

Why does images look good on a computer screen, but a print-out even at hi-resolution produces images that don't look as good?

gttommy — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 03:50:07 -0800

Why does images look good on a computer screen, but a print-out even at hi-resolution produces images that don't look as good? For the sake of argument, a 1280x1024 size photo looks crisp on the screen with solid colours. But when printed out on my new office printer (free-standing A3 type, 30ppm, with 4 paper trays, big toners... you get the idea) looks inconsistent and speckly when viewed up close (printed at 1200dpi with quality set to high). Example, a solid block of red colours on the LCD, would have some speckles when printed on paper.

The quality I would like to see is at the same level of colour brochures you would find in your mailbox.

What I've been told:
I need to print on full-gloss paper
Image resolution needs to be much higher
1200dpi is not high enough
The machine needs a fiery controller, with pantone colours
Only production level printers can produce this level of quality

Thinking about this makes me believe the answer can be pretty complex... I hope not! I want to simple be able to print on standard white paper, and get good quality and solid colours. I think dpi is not a big factor... i mean if there is a block of yellow on screen, i want to see a block of solid yellow on paper.

This long post proves that a picture is indeed a thousand words! Looking forward to your answers!

Shopify without the Shop?

DarlingBri — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 20:30:01 -0800

Shopify without the shop? I'm looking for simple-ish, templated, hosted, all in one website solutions ala Shopify, Good Barry, Clover, Virb... but not. What's the latest and greatest alternative to rolling to my own with WordPress? Last year I recommended Shopify in answer to an Ask question and kept hoping I would have a client I could use it for because it looks great - it's feature richl, the UI is really nice, the pricing structure is sound, the templates are lovely right out of the box, and the CSS is editable. Win.

I now have a semi-client who basically needs a band website - events (gigs), albums, audio, gallery, news. I normally create quick sites for clients in WordPress but I don't have the time and he doesn't have the budget for that. Every "out of the box" alternative I know about isn't sufficient:

Shopify: As much as I still really want to use Shopify, this is not an ecommerce project.
Good Barry: Bought by Adobe, to whom I am not gagging to give money, and the pricing is insanely complex.
Clover: Appears to produce only Flash sites.
Virb: Sucks out loud. The user interface is the polar opposite of WYSIWYG. "Events" are a page you type in. Album feature is nice but the templates are ugly.

There must be somewhere I can spend a few hours sorting this poor guy out and then leave him to add stuff and pay his monthly fee to whomever. What am I missing?

Windows web site creation?

themel — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 09:09:51 -0800

I need a simple code-free web site creation tool for my girlfriend that combines some basic CMS features with a WYSIWYG editor. My girlfriend wants to create a small (static) business web site to be hosted on her own domain. She has a Windows PC to do this and wants to have wide-ranging control over the look of the site without learning HTML/CSS. I'm surprised I can't seem to find a tool that matches her needs.

Basically, I need something that allows me to derive pages and a site structure (ie an autogenerated navigation sidebar and common header/footer stuff) from templates and includes an editor for said templates.

Things we've tried and found inadequate:

- Goldfish, which is about what I want, but it crashes about once per minute on her PC, and its creators only offer support if you cough up 200 dollars for the Pro version first.

- KompoZer and Seamonkey have WISYWYG editors, but apparently don't support any template/CMS features, so you'd have to manually update each page if the sidebar got a new entry? That seems slightly ridiculous in 2010.

- DreamWeaver is way too huge, expensive and assumes knowledge of HTML/CSS.

If there is no Windows software but I'm missing an amazing CMS that allows WYSIWYG editing of its templates as well, anything that I can install on a Linux host is also fine. Free is good, but cheap (<100 USD) is also okay.

I've seen the various previouslies, but the results were either useless or are really outdated by now (I thought I'd like NetObjects Essentials for a while, until I found the references to special feature available only in Netscape4/IE4 in their manual).

What's the best WYSIWYG software for web design these days?

julen — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 21:03:57 -0800

What is the best WYSIWYG website builder for PCs out there these days? My uncle is still using an archaic version of Front Page to produce his family websites. The results look OK but are unusable (hyperlinks don't work) if you are using a Mac or Firefox, which is pretty much rules out 90% of his audience.

So what is the best desktop app for designing websites on a PC these days? He doesn't know HTML, and online webapps aren't an option. It should be easy to use but produce good clean code. Help me only fix the HTML once!

What's the best way to learn WYSIWYG?

helios410 — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 06:51:10 -0800

Website designer filter: I recently had a website built with Squarespace, and it's awesome. The only catch is I will have to update information in the future that was formatted in WYSIWYG. Are there specific tutorials you can recommend? I can obviously edit the text, but my concern is messing up the format of the text columns, moving embedded video around by accident, etc.

How To Find Swing Controls for Slideware?

Alterscape — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 07:19:01 -0800

I'm trying to find some Swing/AWT gui controls for WYSIWYG slide layout authoring. What kind of search terms will help me find these (if, of course, they exist at all)? I'm implementing a subset of PowerPoint's functionality (could also call it inDesign's functionality, or Publisher's functionality, whatever) -- I need a "canvas" onto which I can place and modify text boxes, image boxes, etc. It's important that they be draggable, rescalable, etc. Unfortunately all the search terms I can think of return a lot of noise and not too much signal -- anything with the term "slide," "slideware," "powerpoint" etc, returns far more presentations about java than tools for making presentations in Java.

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.

Free WYSIWIG Editor

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...)