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

[eric_jacobson]

The image insert and insert link functionality has been redone for the next release and is available for preview on the demo site at https://demo.service-now.com/

[LisaD2]

I have all sorts of trouble with our tables, as we have many and in SNC you cannot add columns/rows. Our Developer put me onto a product called "FCKeditor version 2.6". This allowed me to copy out my tables, add rows/columns and put them back. I have also found when I was copying from word documents that this has a clean facility that looks like it manages the formatting.
This is still time consuming, so I have not used a lot but thought it was worth a mention for people to look at.

[nikita_mironov]

+1.

We also face mentioned issues with build-in WYSIWYG 😞 Unfortunately this became a headache for us as well. We had put in place a KB explaining the ways to improve the formatting but this looks a kind of firefighting. Definitely there is a need in better WYSIWYG editor. Now we started logging all WYSIWYG-related issues in /hi reporting each unique issue with the way to reproduce it. Hope this helps to structure somehow the difficulties we (and others) have with WYSIWYG.

[shakesc]

We have a range of challenges with the editor in our KM team

•There is no option to change the bullet type
•When highlighting text and clicking on Bold, it sometimes jumps to the top of the page
•When inserting pictures, sometimes it jumps to the top of the page instead of inserting where you placed the cursor
•When changing from a bulleted sentence to a numbered step, it takes several tries to get the formatting correct (this also happens when pasting the HTML source code)
•When inserting a dividing line, the text sometimes saves on top of the line even if you put the line below the last line of text
•Fonts don't always change correctly or look uniform
•No special characters
•Tables are hard to work with:
oUnable to format them
oUnable to merge cells
oCan't tab between cells —manually have to move the cursor
•Headers will sometimes not apply
•Unable to add anchors (bookmarks) within the article/part
•If you add a step in a part that has sub-bullets, the numbering will screw up. You either need to promote the sub-bullets before adding a step, then add the step, and demote the sub-bullets again OR you will have to fix the numbering from where you added the step down to the end
•Can't copy from another source and paste without totally messing up the format — even if you try to copy from another article in ServiceNow and try to paste, it will not maintain the format
•Spell check is flaky and you cannot add to the dictionary

[avanroy]

In case it's helpful to any of the others having these issues, I thought I'd share a workaround our company implemented a couple years ago that has been very helpful.

Our configuration/development team has added a plain text field in the article editor that allows us to plug in HTML directly and completely bypass SN's editors. While some groups are still able to use SN's WYSIWYG if they need to, others have the option of creating content elsewhere and copy-pasting the HTML into SN. (I'm afraid I can't provide any technical details on how to set up this bypass since I'm only an end user of the tool, but I'm sure SN could provide assistance.)

We specifically use Microsoft FrontPage to generate the HTML externally and then paste it into that text field in SN. This comes with it's own challenges such as stripping out some of the auto-generated Microsoft code, but they are significantly fewer (e.g., our content/screenshots no longer move around during or after publishing) and it allows much more freedom in formatting.

To give you an idea of the volume we deal with, my team currently maintains about 1700 active articles and we have a little over 5000 active articles across the company. We would never be able to handle that volume with our current team size without this workaround and the amount of time it saves us during creation/maintenance.

I would also encourage sending in enhancement requests to SN about the tool (for anyone who hasn't already) to help SN understand just how much these improvements are needed and desired.