KB article formatting

[andrewnorris]

Hello

When pasting content from another source into a new KB article sometimes we find that the formatting is a little peculiar. Certain paragraphs become bold or a different font size.

Some of them can be changed easily but others just won't make the formatting changes (bold, underline, italics, size etc.) at all. I've got around it sometimes by clicking in the paragraph and change the style (Heading1, Normal, Address etc.).

Has anyone else had this issue? Were you able to solve it? My concern is that we have a lot of content to migrate to the KB and this will be a real pain for the lengthier documents.

Thanks,
Andrew

[avanroy]

Mark,

It is definitely not just a MS Word pasting problem. All of the users at my company have been having this problem since Day 1 (which would be over 6 months now). While the problems are worse when the content is copied and pasted from MS Word, the problems still happen if the content is pasted from Notepad to strip all the formatting or even if the content is keyed directly into the WYSIWYG editor. Even creating the content in the HTML editor doesn't prevent all the problems as the HTML coding is "fixed" after going into the WYSIWYG editor to double check the coding.

We spend hours every week simply reformatting our articles over and over again, trying to get the formatting to stay the way we want it to.

~ Amanda

[Mark Stanger]

I've already posted an opinion and possible workarounds. You can log an enhancement request with support if you'd like.

[Mark Stanger]

The only other thing I can think of is to try pressing 'CTRL + 0' after pasting the text in from Word. The WYSIWYG editor may have an option enabled that allows you to clean content pasted from Word by using that key combination.

This article explains the issue and suggests some possible workarounds.
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=359433

[Slava Savitsky]

A lot of issues we come across are not related to copying and pasting text from the web or MS Word. For example, the cursor will sometimes jump to a different position when you click a button on the toolbar (see PRB566320) or two bits of text will simply swap places (see PRB560224), to say nothing of poor handling of line breaks (PRB566487), line spacing (PRB566376), lists (PRB566114), empty lines (INT1949425), and so on.

Not everyone who is involved in Knowledge Management in our company is familiar with HTML, so editing articles in HTML mode is not an option for many people. Even those who know HTML quite well find it difficult to work in HTML mode because IE removes all line breaks from the code as soon as you switch back to WYSIWYG mode (see PRB567023).

Besides, the functionality offered by the current WYSIWYG is so limited that there is no way to perform some basic operations, e.g. add/remove rows/columns in a table or remove a hyperlink without deleting the corresponding piece of text.

Therefore, we strongly believe the WYSIWYG editor requires quite a bit of improvement.

[scott_newton]

Is a better KB editor on the enhancements plate of SNC?

WYSIWYG cut/paste, WYSIWYG from scratch, and images are all a problem. This was brought up at the user conference but I don't know if anyone at SNC was taking notes to address this.