HTML editor window not working in Mac Safari/Firefox

Hi Please can you help - I've got 2 problems with the HTML editor. Both are caused by using a stylesheet in conjuction with the editor. Please can you help me fix as I need to show this to my client asap

1. If I use a stylesheet with the editor my styles do not appear in the editor menu when viewed... all I get is 1 style available in the drop down menu offering 1 option to style it 'bold red'... headline styles appear fine. How can i fix this and get all my stylesheet styles in the menu?

2. If I use a stylesheet the copy in the window get styled fine ... however the scrollbars in the edit window disappear! so you cannot scroll down the copy in the window to edit.... I suppose i could make the HTML editor height thousands of pixels high (I have large pages to edit) but otherwise how can I fix this? If I use the editor without a stylesheet then helpful scrollbars appear as normal.

Any help you can give is much appreciated.

Thanks

chris

This issue with the stylesheet not loading properly (except for 'red title' in the list) has been raised by another member 'info298111' who posted the thread 'Default Incorrect styles' a while ago and eventually uninstalled his HTMLeditor because of it...

Is there a fix for this?

Customising the Styles menu seems clear and easy to accomplish using the HTMLEditor interface. However as far as I and others can see it doesn't actually work, or at least is buggy (perhaps there are circumstances where it does work).

One solution is to edit this file:

\HTMLEditor\fckconfig.js

directly (about line 205), but you won't be able to have different styles for different editors and your style could get overwritten if an update replaces the file.

As far as I can see it's best to avoid the STYLING tab in the Editor settings. It's puzzling to work out exactly what the problem is. In one example the styles did not appear because the XML produced from the CSS file had errors. It created <style name></style> instead of <Style name></Style> (XML is case-sensitive). Even when this doesn't happen, style attributes seem to be ignored. If this were fixed, parsing the CSS can only produce styles of limited use anyway. All styles will be applied with <span> tags so if you want to apply a style to float in image to the right for example, you won't be able to do this by clicking on an image and choosing a style.

Parsing the CSS won't be able to produce XML such as this, where the element is set to "img":

<Style name="Image on Left" element="img">
<Attribute name="style" value="float:left; margin-right:10px; border:solid 1px #000;" />
</Style>

As I suggested I am not clear exactly what happens but I think the solution is to avoid this part of the interface, create the XML yourself and check the paths at the end of the /custom/yourpage.js file:
FCKConfig.EditorAreaCSS = ''; (make sure this is set to '' or your XML file will be overwritten)
FCKConfig.StylesXmlPath should be set to the XML file you've created.

Presumably this feature of the editor was tested so perhaps it does work in some cases, but not for me and a number of others. I think the feature would have to be re-thought if it were to be useful even if the bugs were fixed. Hopefully someone from WA support can clarify or correct some of these observations.

Tom Dupre

Thank you very much for your in-depth reply.

It made my heart sink a bit to hear that the styles function ultimately doesn't work... but in another way kind of relieved, as I was getting a bit fed up of trying to get my head round this editor bug.

If more experienced people such as yourself cannot get it to work then I'm going to have to shelve this goal of getting stylesheets working with the editor.

This is disappointing - hopefully someone at WA can help with a fix?

>I'm going to have to shelve this goal of getting stylesheets working with the editor.

Once you've battled with the editor interface (and surrendered) you can certainly use styles with the editor. FCKeditor supports this, in spite of HTMLeditor making it more difficult. Just put your styles in an XML file and point to the file as I described. Eg here is an example from Styles :

<Styles>
<Style label="Custom Bold" element="span">
<!-- The "style" attribute can be set also
using the <Attribute> node. -->
<Attribute name="style" value="font-weight: bold;" />
</Style>
<Style label="Image on Left" element="img">
<Attribute name="border" value="2" />
<Attribute name="align" value="left" />
<Style name="padding" value="5px" />
<Style name="margin-right" value="5px" />
</Style>
<Style label="Variables Sample" element="span">
<Attribute name="title" value="#('string')" />
<Style name="backgroundColor" value="#('color', '#ff0000')" />
<Style name="color" value="#('select', 'red', 'red|green|blue')" />
<Style name="width" value="#('unit', '', 'px|%')" />
</Style>
</Styles>

This demonstrates the span and img styles. There is plenty of information here. Ideally HTMLeditor would make it unnecessary to read such documentation. As it is, it is necessary (at least as far I am concerned) but more difficult to find because on the face of it you're dealing with different software.

Thanks for this I will try and get it to work!

Cheers

Chris

Good luck. Let me know if you get stuck.

If what I'm suggesting is not the best approach - and it's best to use the interface as provided - I hope someone from WA will step in and help.

Tom