Ladies and gentlemen!

We are planning new version of CourseLab with new text editor as one of the improvements (I mean the one you are using anytime when editing text in any CourseLab object). Since new text editor does not use HTML for storing Rich-text anymore (it generates HTML only for publishing), we are planning to remove HTML Edit button from tools panel. But we understand that new editor should be able to perform all the formatting which you are doing now with plain HTML coding (well, at least most of these formatting task).

So we want to know your opinion: what are you doing now in current version in plain HTML-code mode formatting? Which operations? What we forgot to include in new text editor? Please advice.

You can see some new text editor features on the <a href="http://www.courselab.com/clpics/screenshot_TE.gif" target="_blank">screenshot</a> (see also some explanations on the screenshot).

Hi Slav,

good to hear from you !

In fact we're using html mainly for:
1) quick fixing editor "strange formatting" (i.e., when changing text font or size from dropdown menu, text is not always changing correspondingly)

2) manually fixing Firefox formatting issues (genereated HTML sometimes works with IE, but not with Firefox)

Thanks
Have a nice day !
Andrea

Hi Slav,

Its exciting that you are planning a new version of Courselab, I'm sure it will have great new features and concepts.

With regard to the text editor, I guess now with the autoshape and its formatting features the text editor has now become more effective and helpful for us.

All the best!

I sometimes drop in non-layout code, java snippets or relatively long chunks of code. Things like google analytics tags can be handy on web delivered content, google maps and other such things.
I'd be quite happy to add them within the xml files so it's not a great loss of functionality.

I frequently use the html view to get rid of all formatting tags and use classes instead which I define in an external stylesheet.

Long term that might be a desirable feature in Courselab. If not through a structured component part of Courselab itself so that anyone can potentially use it (I can see that adding a menu driven system to define CSS and then add a method of adding the tags would be a large coding exercise) then by a slightly more hidden but still accessible route for advanced use.

Nick,
it might be easier to provide a way to:
1. link or import a css file
2. show a drop-down box in the editor populated with the extracted ids and classes that can be assigned to elements in the editor

That would provide an easy mechanism to adapt to an existing CI where usually a lot of style definitions already exist.

And even if not. Creating a stylesheet containing definitions like .mycompaniesgreen: #00dd00; would be far easier than setting up colors like its done currently.

I don't think an integrated style editor would be necessary. There are many around already.

I agree there Juergen, I still build all my css structures with a text editor. Most people would finf that quite difficult.
The drop down to tag to classes is nice.