2011/10/14

Write Area 1.1 discussion

Seems that some people don't like the new integrated mode of Write Area, so I would like to know better what's the problem and what can be done to keep everything simple and useful for as most people as possible.
First, I've added a survey at the side pane. Of course, remember that we are talking just about the textarea replacement; if you're using it to replace an existing HTML editor then this survey isn't for you because there's no integrated mode in that situation. In the survey you should be able to check more than one option if you think that you would use more than one mode if all there were available.
So far the complains have been about the removal of the option to edit in a popup dialog, I didn't read anyone complaining about the removal of the bottom pane and at least that's a good thing. Can we all agree that the bottom pane isn't needed?
Then the dialog thing. Why are you having problems with the new mode and need the dialog back?
Please, write a comment here explaining (in a civilized way) why the integration mode doesn't work for you. I've got one comment about problems in tumblr.com, I'll try to check that tomorrow, although I'm not sure if I'll have enough time as I had planned other things to do.
But if you provide a list of things that don't work as expected then I can try to look at them and then fix them one by one or bring back the dialog if they can't be fixed in integrated mode.
Now it's your turn if you want a change in this extension.

4 comments:

lucidbeaming said...

First of all, thank you for all the hard work you've put into make this free and useful utility.

Our copy editor uses Write Area to format text in our primitive CMS entry page. She preferred the pop up option for two reasons. First, she wears glasses and has to increase the zoom level on all pages. She was able to increase the size of the window as needed and it didn't affect elements on other pages. Second, the entry page is built using frames. I know that's an ancient approach but we can't change it. The modal window option has problems with scrolling and resizing in a zoomed frame.

A common task is to build a page using links from many articles. Having a separate window allowed Write Area to function like a standalone application while switching between tabs in the primary Firefox.

I'd like to use the opportunity to bring up a separate but long-standing issue. When we use em-dashes or directional apostrophes or quotes, they are not correctly translated when saving. I came up with a utility that converts those to html entities before pasting into the textarea. Unfortunately, Write Area takes those entities and converts them back to the original characters. Is it possible to add a feature to "Convert high characters to entities"?

Again, thanks for making this and keeping it up to date for so long. It's effective and useful.

-Joshua Curry
Charleston City Paper

Alfonso said...

I think that I have bad news about the zoom level.

Currently the dialog is created based on an internal element, so it happened that the editor wasn't really launched from the page and it didn't share the zoom or other settings specific to that domain, but I'm planning to change that and stop using the special element.
If I apply that change then there won't be such difference.
A possible workaround could be to include the "zoom plugin" that allows to zoom the content just like MS Word, but that leaves the toolbar and dialog as they are, so it might not be the solution that she needs.

With regards to frames, yes I can understand that in such situations the integrated editor is not the best option because the maximize option won't be able to grow beyond the frame itself.

But that last task about switching tabs in Firefox can be done with the new mode just as easily as it was before with the dialog. Just open one window with the editor and maximize it (as long as there are no frames) and open a new window to perform all the research (or drag&drop the existing editor tab to its own window)

With regards to those special entities, can you paste here which ones are you talking about?
Can you check if your CMS is using UTF-8 or an ascii encoding like iso-8859-1 or iso-8859-15?
(look at Firefox button, Web developer, character encoding or View, character encoding)

Sarge88 said...

Just an issue i found. however idk if its with CKEditor or not. anyway while using the bullet points (li), I tried to create a return before another bullet point but after saving it and reopening it the returns disappear. idk how else to explain it lol.

Alfonso said...

@Sarge88 I'm not able to reproduce that problem, so it might be a problem with your CMS.

You can try to switch to Source and back to Design mode, if everything remains the same then there's nothing wrong with CKEditor or Write Area.

And if you can check if something is an error in CKEditor you can test it in the demo: http://ckeditor.com/demo