textarea WYSIWYG - Best choice

Lesser of N evils?

[bofe]

I know WYSIWYGs are considered evil, but since I won't be the primary source of my content -- and the primary sources of my content typically use MS Word to produce the text what recommendations do you all have?

Free?

Not free?

Thanks so much!

[CritterNYC]

Word is actually the absolute worst choice for creating content that will later become web pages. Some tools, like Dreamweaver, allow you to partially clean up messy Word creations, but it'll never convert into clean code web pages. If you need others to create content for a site, something like Contribute may be a better option. Or give them a template and a tool like Kompozer (the bug-fix update of NVU which is also free) and let them work within that.

[bofe]

Let me clarify my original problem...

I need to implement a WYSIWYG solution for content to be taken from an HTML form and written to a file or to a database. I can write to the file or the database easily. That's not the problem.

Most of (99%) the content's producers work in word primarily. They do not have time to learn HTML I do not have time to 'clean up' their documents using Dreamweaver-like utilities - unless there is one that can be installed with Apache/PHP setup?

I'm quite aware of the horrid HTML word produces, but it is not in my hands to have the content producers to move away from Word.

Will Contribute gracefully handle copy/pastes from Word? Will Kompozer?

Also, in my case, a site's template will be produced (by me) - I just need the content to be maintained by others.

[pageoneresults]

Will Contribute gracefully handle copy/pastes from Word? Will Kompozer?

I don't think anything will handle copy/pastes from Word gracefully. Not even Microsoft products! ;)

mso mso mso mso mso mso mso mso mso mso...

[schwartz]

an interesting word doc cleaner i ran across today: [textism.com...]

[sc112]

tinymce [tinymce.moxiecode.com] - Javascript WYSIWYG editor, open-source

...TinyMCE can be configurated to function with Word content in the best possible way. TinyMCE is configured to auto convert/cleanup pasted Word content in this example. It's has also a custom CSS that makes paragraphs marginless as in Word.

[CritterNYC]

You can use a CMS like Drupal (just as an example) and then TinyMCE or one of the other drop-in WYSIWYG editor components. TinyMCE has some decent word cleaning abilities. But, nothing that I know of can truely clean up Word's mess... so it may bork your site at some point.

You could encourage them to compose short pieces inside the browser (using the TinyMCE editor) or to paste in plaintext and then apply the formatting within TinyMCE. That way, they can compose the meat of it (the text) offline using their editor of choice and then use the editor to add any bolds, italics, etc.

BTW - At no point did I suggest they use HTML directly. End-users can't be expected to do that.