WYSIWYG issue

[MothMan]

I've been eagerly waiting for the WYSIWYG post editor... and have been playing around with it.

What I've found though is that it doesn't seem to "quite" format content correctly.

eg...  from http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/03/20/nicholls-plesiosaur.html

When copy/pasting the first section of that article, it appears as below.

As can be seen, the line breaks, and text formatting,  don't carry over properly.

Is this "normal" ?


                    

Ancient sea reptile from Alberta oilsands yields research bounty  Last Updated:   Thursday, March 20, 2008 |  1:14 PM ET   Comments2Recommend8   CBC News                                                 A reptile that once prowled the seas where Alberta's oilsands now sit has been named after a paleontologist who studied prehistoric ocean life.
In a paper that formally describes the carnivorous aquatic predator, paleontologists from the University of Calgary have named the 2.6-metre-long plesiosaur Nichollsia borealis in memory of Elizabeth (Betsy) Nicholls.  The skull of Nichollsia borealis is on display at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alta.
(Royal Tyrrell Museum)   Nicholls, who passed away in 2004, was a former curator at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller. One of her biggest projects was describing the largest-ever prehistoric marine reptile, a 23-metre-long ichthyosaur, found in northern B.C. in 1999.
Former U of C graduate student Patrick Druckenmiller and biological sciences professor Anthony Russell wrote the paper published in the current issue of the German research journal Palaeontographica Abteilung.
"We chose this name because Betsy was a key player in the study of marine reptiles, a mentor to me, a former student of Tony, and a great person," said Druckenmiller in a news release Thursday.

[karlbenson]

I wouldn't expect it to appear EXACTLY as it appears on that page with the image floated to the left etc.

[shadow82x]

If you play with the editor a little bit deeper you will notice more bugs.

[MothMan]

Alrighty.  Thanks.  Was just curious.

[wildfisher]

Sorry for being a total dumb-ass, but on my installation and on this board I can't see the wysiwyg editor at all.

I have "Show WYSIWYG editor on post page by default?"  Ticked in my profile but no joy.

Any ideas? I can't find any way to enable / disable it globally in the admin section. Have I just missed it?

[karlbenson]

It does no show in Quick Reply.

Are you on the full screen reply.

If it doesn't show click this icon in the bbcode buttons

[wildfisher]

Thanks karlbenson.

Turns out it was this Opera browser I'm using................

[karlbenson]

Yeah the earlier versions of Opera are **** for javascript support.

But the latest Opera9.5b WILL work.

(finally decent javascript support in opera)

[metallica48423]

How was the original posted information sourced?

Some formatting isn't fully supported, such as using full on HTML posted from a source. (would be a potential security issue).  Things like DIVS and such wont work well.  But keep in mind theres still some tweaks going on

Naturally, Microsoft word is problematic as well due to how it encodes the data.

[MothMan]

Sorry for the slow response.

The original data was copy-pasted from a http://www.cbc.ca/news/ news story.

[SleePy]

I got it to work ok well in Firefox.
I am updating Opera right now to test it as well.

But that might be because I used the latest svn of SMF that it also worked 

Edit,
I must be stupid as I can't get opera to copy and paste and keep the formating Oh well, I assume its an opera beta issue

[internationalflyerz]

Hi!

I'm new to SMF, however so far I find it a lot easier to use then our previous phpbb3. I just have one issue with the WYSIWYG editor. If I'm trying to copy and paste a certain article I find somewhere onto our site, it will show perfectly in the post part of the editor, but once I hit preview or send, the post gets all messed up.

This is an example of what I'm trying to do, here is the article I'm copying: http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/lockheed-says-t-50-well-suited-for-usafs-next-generation-trainer-needs-377784/ [nofollow]

Then I paste it with a quote into the editor:



As you can see the buttons all show without a hitch, but when I post or click on preview, I get this:



Is there something I'm not doing right? I'm using a Mac and the posting hitch happens on both Safari and Firefox.

Any pointers?

Thanks!

[Arantor]

Short of rewriting the WYSIWYG editor there is no way to fix this.

[internationalflyerz]

Short of rewriting the WYSIWYG editor there is no way to fix this.

So I'm not the only one that has a problem with this, this is a WYSIWYG fault?

[Arantor]

Not a *fault* exactly, more that you're trying to do something for which it really, really wasn't designed for.

It's not designed to be a magic copy/paste/rip-off-someone-else's-content-exactly tool.

[MrPhil]

Rather than trying to copy (cut and paste) an article from another site (aren't you in violation of copyright?), why not just put a teaser or abstract in your post, and a link using the [url] tag? If you have permission to copy such articles, you'd have to do a cut and paste that strips out all formatting, edit out fluff like "19 hours ago", and reformat using either explicit (non-WYSIWYG) BBCode tags or maybe you can use WYSIWYG. A lot of work and probably not worth it.

[internationalflyerz]

Thanks for the replies so far. We're just running our site as a hobby and we're non profitable. I always thought, if you quote the original content as a quote it was ok. If we're violating copyrights, we will stop it.

As for the WYIWYG editor, we started out out on this freebee forum thing called africanmotion.net [nofollow] and that WYSIWYG editor would copy and paste all content. I just thought the SMF WYSIWYG editor would do the same.

[Arantor]

Quoting is fine - it's a small part of the work. Fair use covers that, but fair use doesn't cover copying the entire thing, even with attribution.

Thing is, it is keeping most of the content, it's just dropping most of the markup, including the stuff you don't really want on your site anyway (like the then-broken Facebook like code for the original article)

[internationalflyerz]

The manual copying and pasting we've been doing for a while now, I just thought that the SMF WYSIWYG editor would be so much easier and speed up time.

Again, we have no intention of "ripping off" stuff, all we do is read the article now quoted on our site and discuss it, if that violates copy right rules, we will obviously stop that right away, we don't mean to do any harm or illegal stuff.

I just thought that the editor would work like that other site. Thanks for the help, it's much appreciated!

[MrPhil]

Different WYSIWYG editors behave in different ways, according to how they're implemented and what the site being edited supports. For example, some such editors are able to cut and paste images (but I don't think SMF's does, because it can only handle BBCode links to image files). SMF's WYSIWYG editor is fairly simple minded, as such editors go, not really intended to seamlessly cut and paste in Rich Text format, but more to insert BBCode tags without the user seeing the tags themselves. If you try to paste in formatted text and images, don't count on it working as expected. Maybe it will in some/most cases, maybe it won't.

And yes, I would opine that you very likely are violating copyright by copying much or all of the article. I would suggest just an abstract or teaser (the first few lines) and a link to the original article.