WYSIWYG Editor for clients to make their own content before submitting

[ryan_b83]

Hello, I run into the same problem on every website I do. The client provides a Word file with their content including some basic formatting (Bold, Order Lists, Line Breaks, Paragraphs...) Anyways for the small stuff its not really a big deal, but for some pages that are huge it is quite a bit of work to go through the content line by line to format into html what the client already formatted in Word.

I had 2 ideas to solve this. Have the client provide us their content through a WYSIWYG editor so they are forced to use something like TinyMCE which will give us standardized tagging which is easier to paste into sites.

The other option is to find a WYSIWYG editor which is capable of providing the HTML text broken down to as few tags as possible, without adding class or style attributes.

Does anyone know of a WYSIWYG editor which would be ideal for this, or maybe another solution to the problem all together?

Thanks,
Ryan

[Wlauzon]

Perhaps one option is to have the client provide two files - one formatted in the editor to show how they want it to look, and the same file just saved as a plain text file.

[ryan_b83]

Yea we have in the past just copy/pasted the provided formatted file into notepad to strip down all formatting, but it still requires going through it and tagging everything in Dreamweaver... Still a good solution though. Just wondering if there was any quicker/simpler approaches.

Thanks,
Ryan

[piatkow]

You seem to have a redundant step there. You should be able to paste directly into a WYSIWYG editor if you want to use that for formatting, or manually code the tags in Notepad.

I have had similar problems and I have tried using the "save as html" option in Word then opening in Notepad and copying just the relevant body text. It is still full of bloated code and takes almost as long to fix as putting the tags into plain text.

[pageoneresults]

Give them a simple online CMS with one of the more popular text editors. That will solve all of your problems. I just did one recently and it works like a charm.

With Word Documents, there will "always" be reformatting. The removal of mso tags on every element is usually the first thing. I use FrontPage along with its Remove Formatting commands. I also do the line by line reformatting because the clients do not typically have the experience to properly format the page. They use the wrong elements in most instances.

[solaris07]

I would suggest TinyMCE. Will I don't know of any WYSIWYG editors that format the same as MS Word, TinyMCE is probably the closest. It has a setting actually for pasting text into it from MS Word and maintianing the format as much as possible. Many mainstream CMS systems use TinyMCE as their default editor too.

[willis1480]

TinyMCE has one drawback though...no built in upload. If you got a little time not too hard to add your own.

I can send you the code to change TinyMCE to add a fileupload...real simple.