WYSIWYG Customization

More WYSIWYG Fun

Previously, I created a custom module to change the symbol set provided by CKEditor, the WYSIWYG text editor on this site. (CKEditor is an applet that shows live formatting instead in lieu of HTML). Since then, a few other flaws have come up. 

  1. Spellcheck is provided by a third party, but doesn't work in Opera. Modern browsers have their own spellcheckers, which were being suppressed. 
  2. CKEditor provides a few styles for theming text. There are two problems with those styles. First, they're inline styles. Second, they're ugly. 
  3. CKEditor uses its own styling. Ordinary formatting such as italics and headings look okay, but styles I've defined don't show up. 

Module Hacks

I installed a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) module for Drupal recently. The module adds a formatting bar to edit fields, and displays what a post will look like after HTML is applied. It's called WYSIWYG (creative!), and I'm using it with a pretty little editor called CKEditor.

CKEditor contains a symbol select, which is incredibly useful for inserting characters like α and © into posts. Unfortunately, the default symbols selector was full of garbage (it contained mostly keyboard letters, without any greek. I write about coding and ECE, so symbols like Ω and µ will see a lot of use. 

Fortunately, there's an incredibly simple override. The Drupal module overrides the editors own settings, but overriding the WYSIWYG module it trivial.