Hi guys,

I am going to 100% get a no, but I just want to note it down because it's bugging me now... but is there any chance in hell we can get an in-text editor? I can live with the fact that, if I want to bold a text, I have to manually either a) pre-emptively write the code in in Word or b) go back after I copy it and control+B it every time I want to use bold. I can even live with the fact that our editor tracks characters, not words (why? lord, why?). But the fact that I have to manually go and write in line breaks because our editor can't determine that, like in word, pressing enter is a line break and instead it just starts a line below is sort of mind-boggling to me..

I understand this is all built from the ground up etc. etc. but in-text editors are such a basic QoL thing that I am sort of shocked that this website not only launched without one, but has remained up and running for so long without anyone throwing a fit over this. It's a writing website and it's insane that the part of the website that seems most neglected is the actual way we write...

Maybe I just wanted to vent my frustration.

Signed,
someone that has to manually go put line breaks in my paragraphs now.

@Dion

If you add two blank lines, a space, and two more blank lines it's a way to hack more spacing.

But that's not the point of the question, I realize. Believe it or not, it's not a request very many (if any) people have brought up before. A what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor is a pretty difficult technical challenge—even parsing BBCode normally is far less than trivial. But to answer your question, it's now something on my radar, but not something I'd expect to see working overnight.

@LegendBegins with how prevalent these in-text editors are on other websites, I almost feel like there might be ready made solutions -- which, I'm also aware, would be great if RPG could simply slot those in but from what I've understood over the last 10+ years, that's not something Mahz ever accounted for + allowed for.

I'll go cry in my corner..

@Dion

I’d really just need to find an OSS project with the easily specified inputs and outputs. Part of the problem is that a lot of people who make these kinds of things often want a huge integrated platform, which isn’t conducive to a Guild plugin.

@LegendBegins just thinking out loud but, with Word being the standard, I am assuming there might be ready made projects that literally port Word into forum formats. I am assuming that because of how RPG is built up that those won't actually work in a PnP type of way but is the work transferable at all?

I'm unsure if it solves anything, but Google Docs has a bbcode converter extension you can add. It's not perfect, but it saves me a ton of time.

It'll tackle almost all your basic formatting and text colouring for your everyday posts.

@Dion

Like uploading a .docx file? Or if you mean using the code behind a project like that, Word uses XML under the hood and the part that renders is starting with XML, not Markdown like RPG does. Really, the solution for a WYSIWYG editor is just to render the BBCode as HTML as it's generated and automatically respond to certain button clicks by generating the requisite BBCode to create the intended object. It's not conceptually awful, but implementing it isn't going to be trivial.

@LegendBegins nah I meant just straight up copying the entire functionality of Word style editing over to a forum, but I'd sorta figured it was a bit more complicated than that, ha.