#20 Rich Text Editor

[Anonymous]

Well from reading the FlexWikiPad page at flexwiki.com, I
can see that a wysiwyg type interface is not one of
your design objectives.

If however, it could be an alternate view through the
use of a tabbed pane etc, it would greatly increase the
usefulness of FlexWikiPad to a wider audience.

Which in turn would make flexwiki itself more
approachable to non-technical people.

I know from experience that when I present flexwiki to
non-technical people they can be educated to
appreciate the advantages but as soon as they see the
strange formatting characters required, the interest
drops off. They will periodically use it, mainly to reply to
a request from a technical person, but will otherwise
avoid it.

I'm seeing other issues that might be addressed by
improvements to WikiTalk, but for the most part, the
largest part of the problem is a non-technical population
used to MS Word.

I haven't yet searched to see if other wiki's have any
solutions that might be adaptable, I am just assuming
that there probably isn't anything which inspired you to
construct FlexWikiPad.

I don't think a lot of functionality is required as long as
non-technical users can see a somewhat familiar editing
interface.

[Craig Andera]

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I don't know of anything that has this particular feature. I
was inspired to write FlexWikiPad by WikidPad, but it also
uses wiki syntax.

I *really* hesitate to move the app in this direction. For
my own personal use, the whole point of FlexWikiPad is that
it has to be lightning fast to enter things and to navigate,
because I use it to to take notes. I realize that other
people have different priorities, of course, but I have to
keep my own goals at the forefront.

One thing I could see doing would be to add a toolbar with
the familiar bold, italic, and underline options. When
selected, these would insert the appropriate formatting
characters. So, for example, you could type "foo" and then
highlight it and hit the "bold" button (or hit ctrl-B) and
it would change into "*foo*".

The underlying control that I use (scintilla) also supports
hiding characters, so it's possible that we could do
something that would allow you to either see or not see
formatting characters. Combined with a formatting toolbar,
that might work. I'd have to prototype that to see if it
would work okay.

Another option would be for someone to revive Omar's
FlexWikiEditor - in other words do the WYSIWYG editor as an
entirely separate program. I'd be more than happy to donate
the FlexWikiPad code as a starting point.

What do you think?

In any event, this one is going to be somewhat lower
priority for me for now: I have too many other features that
are on the "required" list enroute to version 1.0.

Of course, if lots of people pipe up and say that this is
crucial, I can always be swayed. :)