Rich Text Editor - Paragraph Break Fixed

Please report back if it is not working, but Jin fixed it and we've tested and released.

 

It was inconsistent, which was one of the issues but Jin seems to have solved the riddle.

Yargh. No!

 

As I've just commented in another thread, the problem now is that anything written with explicit HTML formatting, including line breaks (<br> or <br />) and paragraph breaks (<p>) seems to be turning up as plain text. Which wouldn't be a disaster for new posts except that it would stop me from doing some nicer formatting than the WYSIWYG editor can manage, but it does mean all the posts which have been using this workaround now have the formatting visible.

 

Any chance of a quick detection script to see whether the post already had formatting in it before applying the "treat as plain text" fix?

Just to follow up: formatting that was written manually from before the site updates looks intact, rather than the HTML tags being explicit. Perhaps the fix is to run a conversion script over the new posts (preferably trimming out more than two consecutive line breaks), and tell us not to keep using the HTML tags?

 

It might be helpful to have a site-wide announcement mechanism, btw - can anything be hooked into the notifications? Otherwise a message to everyone might be the best solution. I don't think people are going to see fix announcements if they're only posted in the site help forum - unless I'm the only one who never uses the overall site digest view.

Now the fix has broken the previous < br > workaround which now show as plain text and don't accomplish what they are supposed to do. Nice work!

 

Just to test, this is supposed to be after a paragraph break.

And <br><br> does what exactly?

 

Fix works, now HTML is broken :(

 

a site-wide announcement mechanism, btw

+100000000000000000000000000000000

And <br><br> does what exactly?

 

Was that a question for me or a test on the site? Historically I found the configured space between paragraphs in the photo.net style sheet to be small enough to cause confusion in my long posts (yes, I've hit the new 10,000 character limit, twice), so I'd put two explicit line breaks in the way instead.

 

The good news is that we have "bbcode" for doing interesting formatting. The bad news is that I'm unclear whether it's as effective as plain HTML and it's yet another random markup scheme that I have to learn. As part of my job I'm already having to deal with (X)HTML, LaTeX, asciidoc, docbook, GitHub's internal not-quite-asciidoc mark-up, doxygen, RTF and jira. I wish people would stop inventing "easier" ways to format things - it was never that awkward to use and read HTML (okay, or LaTeX) and every attempt to improve it just makes another thing to learn for those of us who already learned HTML. Plus the "improved" versions tend to be slightly less flexible than the common subset of whatever they're actually implemented on top of. I'd not find this as annoying in photo.net if I wasn't already exposed to so many other cases of it, but this seems to be my chance to rant on the subject. Not that I'm expecting that particular thing to be fixed, since I assume it's fairly core to the way the BBS works now we've got plan text line breaks staying that way.

Was that a question for me or a test on the site?

A test. And a failed one at that.

LaTeX

OT, but someone I worked with wanted us to use if for all publications. After having to edit one line in someone's document, a task that took me hours to complete and during which I managed to make things progressively worse, I simply refused to ever look at LaTex again. Ever. Never again! The chicken-scratch syntax of C already made my skin crawl; luckily I could get away with good old Fortran in those days. But LaTex:eek::eek::eek:. Pwwerful, yes. Overkill for what we needed though. And definitely:eek::eek::eek:

 

On a site like this, I want WYSIWYG. Plain and simple. Or better: what I type is what I get. A space is a space, A line break is a line break (don't care about paragraph breaks as line breaks accomplish the same thing). I select it and make it bold, I want bold. I insert a hyperlink, I want it to function as one without fussing about with some special icon and resulting pop-up. Same with an image. How hard can it really be accomplish WYSIWYG without any of the fuzz? (Don't answer that, I don't want to lose hope!)

Edited March 9, 2017 by Dieter Schaefer

LaTeX is good at some things and terrible at others. I used it as a way to avoid Word for a magazine (because at least I knew why LaTeX was doing weird stuff, it just took a long time to get at it) and then I bought InDesign, whose biggest problem is a user interface consisting of two kinds of arrow and a propensity for holding down three keys and a mouse button to implement simple functionality. You're not going to sell me on FORTRAN, though - six characters of significant whitespace (how did this make it back into Python?), variable types by name, default pass by reference (although I've met pass-by-copy-restore, which is weirder) and a tendency to SHOUT kind of put me off. But I can rant about most programming languages, so I wouldn't take it personally. (Whisper words of wisdom, write in C...)

 

I'd like WYSIWYG to work, if it's predictable and flexible. Given that Microsoft have utterly failed at this for the best part of thirty years (and even I don't think they're that incompetent), I don't have high hopes for the a small web site management firm. Normally it's what-you-see-is-what-I-think-you-meant - for example, quoting some text containing another quote on the old site was best achieved by writing nested blockquotes in HTML. (I've been splitting up quoted messages by typing [ QUOTE ] manually so far on the new site; I'll be interested to see how we're supposed to do that now. Ah, QUOTE still does things, good to know...) I'll gladly settle for WYSIWYG vaguely working most of the time, and a workaround the rest of the time. Which is presumably what BBScript is supposed to be, I'm just annoyed that it's also what ten other things I have to remember how to use are trying to do. https://xkcd.com/927/ - and I should know, I work with standards.

 

I'm not expecting this to be within the remit of the photo.net site maintainers, since it's fairly fundamental to the underlying BBS system. I'll be interested to see improvements to the text editor roll out, though. Big thanks to the team for getting rid of the "type your reply" text (I only just noticed it was gone, but it had been annoying for a while - and spacing under it doesn't work when you're writing enough text to scroll). Now if the edit box was big enough to hold more than five lines and everything wasn't greyed out, that would be lovely, but baby steps. :)

My programming days are over, so FORTRAN can stay buried alongside C (at least FORTRAN was readable).

 

No argument from me on what WORD does and does not do; it propensity to screw things up seems to be unlimited. The one thing I am certain about with WORD: whatever I think something I do is meant to accomplish, WORD will prove me wrong. Got quite good at copying paragraph marks (with the embedded formatting information). Any attempt of mine to get a list within a list usually is met with disaster at one point or another. Even trying to set up all kinds of headings beforehand and attempting to remember which ones does what - eventually WORD (or me) will get confused. Of course, I blame WORD (that's my story and I am sticking with it).

LaTeX is good at some things and terrible at others.

I take your word for it; seems I have only encountered the "terrible" parts of it. I know that I can control how a text looks in every detail with it, just never had the need for that level of sophistication.

Now the fix has broken the previous < br > workaround which now show as plain text and don't accomplish what they are supposed to do. Nice work!

 

Just to test, this is supposed to be after a paragraph break.

And <br><br> does what exactly?

 

Fix works, now HTML is broken :(

 

The basic PN preferences provide two text modes: plain text (default) or RTF (if you check the RTF box). In addition the software creator has made it possible to use BBcode tags--but there is no standard BBcode for hard coding a paragtaph or a line break.

 

As for the myriad of other formatting systems, including HTML, LaTex, etc., they are not supported out-of-the-box by the software now in use.

 

Personally, I'll be satisfied if paragraph breaks now work based on the normal double stroke of the return key with no workarounds required.

This is a test of plain old carriage returns as I type to get paragraph breaks.

 

This is the next paragraph where I used two carriage returns.

It worked. I'm glad I don't have use the br code anymore.

 

Once more just for the record.

Paragraph 1

 

Paragraph 2

 

Last paragraph...

Personally, I'll be satisfied if paragraph breaks now work based on the normal double stroke of the return key with no workarounds required.

If I haven't made that one clear by now, so am I. Having to use some HTML workaround isn't my idea of how an editor should work these days.

"When you work with words...

 

...words are your work."

 

quote from Luther Heggs, the typesetter in the movie "The Ghost and Mr. Chicken".

 

Works for me! Yippee!

I guess since things have really improved thanks to Jin and Glenn, I'm going to play around with the rest of the Rich Text Editor do-dads.

 

Let's see how to change color, font family,font size,Cool!...It all works!

I think I'm going to like the new digs here. Thanks, Glenn and Jin!

Try the quotes from the dropdown list.

I just got a new computer and was wondering why it was causing the <BR><BR> to now show up in the older posts where HTML had been used.

 

Whew, I am glad it is not my computer but just a result of getting the line breaks working. Those old posts will slip out of focus and into history soon enough anyway.

As for the myriad of other formatting systems, including HTML, LaTex, etc., they are not supported out-of-the-box by the software now in use.

 

Oh yes (and, to be clear, I was in no way requesting LaTeX, just grumbling about BBCode being yet another way of doing something that there are already lots of ways to do - which, again, is less flexible than letting us edit the HTML). The current issue is that people like me have been using HTML tags since the site upgrade, as we used to do with the old site, so now our posts are full of visible HTML tags. This can probably be fixed by someone running a script over the posts since the upgrade and doing some simple text substitutions; it would be lovely if that were to happen.

 

I'm not advocating that we continue to be allowed to use HTML tags. (Well, I am, because I don't especially want to get used to BBCode as another less-capable way of formatting stuff that's just going to get converted to HTML anyway, but I'll accept that this is a big change to impose on the software, so I'll let it go.) Just that it would be nice to fix the existing posts, now we can all transition to the new rules for layout.

 

RTF (if you check the RTF box).

 

Sorry, is there a way to enter RTF directly? I've apparently got this clicked, and it gives WYSIWYG; I'll have an experiment as to what happens if I turn it off, but I was expecting it just to remove ways to type anything other than plain text.

Okay, un-checked RTF, and the WYSIWYG bit has gone. Does manually typing RTF {\b do anything}?

 

I'll take that as a no. :-)

One other try - now with "Use the rich text editor" not ticked in my preferences... does BB Code work (and <b>HTML</b> not)?

 

It would appear that the answer is yes - having "use the rich text editor" not ticked is equivalent to clicking on the BB Code editor mode when you do have it ticked. Apparently there are only two modes, and I'm guessing maybe the underlying representation is BB Code. I guess I'll just have to learn it, then. It's not the end of the world - all of these mark-up schemes were intended to be easy to use (except possibly HTML, which was designed to be an SGML variant), but I've now got a lot of them to conflate.

One other try - now with "Use the rich text editor" not ticked in my preferences... does BB Code work (and <b>HTML</b> not)?

 

It would appear that the answer is yes - having "use the rich text editor" not ticked is equivalent to clicking on the BB Code editor mode when you do have it ticked. Apparently there are only two modes, and I'm guessing maybe the underlying representation is BB Code. I guess I'll just have to learn it, then. It's not the end of the world - all of these mark-up schemes were intended to be easy to use (except possibly HTML, which was designed to be an SGML variant), but I've now got a lot of them to conflate.

Check your Preference settings where it has a check box indicating an option to use Rich Text Editor.

Check your Preference settings where it has a check box indicating an option to use Rich Text Editor.

 

Yes. That's the thing that toggles between WYSIWYG and BB Code mode by default (as opposed to clicking on it manually during editing). The default (checked) position gives me the WYSIWYG editor. It's "rich text" as in WYSIWYG, not actual RTF - otherwise "{\b do anything}" would have been in bold.

 

When I wrote "BB Code" above, I wrote it as open-square-bracket b close-square-bracket in the "rich text editor" un-checked view - and that's the same behaviour I get from the bbcode editor.

 

I wrote the HTML version surrounded by <b> and </b> HTML-style. If they both work, epic, I'm a happy bunny. If there's been a filtering of messages to apply HTML tags as a one-off (which I guess I'll find out when I hit "Post Reply"), it's at least what I was suggesting as a workaround!

 

Edit: Looks like a one-off that the previous message worked (unless alt codes don't work but <b>still does</b>, so I guess someone's run a script over previous HTML. Good enough, I'll just try to restrict myself to bbcode and hope I don't need any HTML oddities!

 

Um. Edit edit, HTML bold still works, but character codes don't seem to. And now the new-style line breaks have disappeared. I guess things are in flux!

 

One more try with HTML-style line breaks?<br />

<br />

If this is on a different line, those are still working, or at least some form of paragraph break is back.

Then I don't understand what you're issue is, Andrew. I was under the impression that WYSIWYG editor was all that you were after. Now from your response I don't know what you're talking about with regard to HTML, BBcode and the rest.

Then I don't understand what you're issue is, Andrew. I was under the impression that WYSIWYG editor was all that you were after. Now from your response I don't know what you're talking about with regard to HTML, BBcode and the rest.

 

DrBen's comment confused me into thinking there might actually be a way to enter RTF (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Text_Format), which would have been appealing because, while RTF is less human-readable, I believe it's more flexible than bbcode. Historically I've done a number of posts using html to describe things that were awkward in the WYSIWYG editor (definition lists and nested quotes spring to mind - though bbcode might be able to do the latter). I notice that lists with hierarchies do seem to work in WYSIWYG in the new system, though. Of course, with the old system, I could use my browser with JavaScript disabled and type plain HTML the whole time; sadly that seems no longer to be an option.

 

Anyway, no biggie, just briefly getting optimistic. I'm not hugely objecting to bbcode being the way forward - I'll work with what we've got. And the WYSIWYG editor isn't terrible, although I'll be happier when it's not greyed out (Chrome, Linux)!

 

Aside from the mandatory JavaScript, both direct editing and mark-up have their place. I've literally just been laying out formulae in asciidoc - which would have been quicker in a WYSIWYG editor right up to the point when I could no longer tell it what I wanted it to do. It's like the quickest way to move images between directories being ctrl-A and dragging them - but the quickest way to make a load of pngs into jpegs is (for me) "for i in *.png; do convert $i `basename $i .png`.jpg; done". You have to allow time to sacrifice a chicken whenever you're doing serious scripting, though.