online "wysiwyg" editor

[terje-s]

Hi!

I need to write a usable online page editor where one can insert pictures and write text (and call some system modules etc, but thats no worries if you can insert text properly). My problem is not to link inputted text with pictures etc, but rather a good technique to tell my scripts how to display it. E.g. one could insert ?IMG1? in the text to show uploaded image #1. This, however, does not actually tell me where to put it. I need to know stuff like, aligned left, aligned right, image text, bla bla..

I thought of first write the text, then upload pictures, then choose where you want them. I'd do this by inserting the pictures with arrow up, down, left and right to move them within a table (3+ td's, 2+ tr's). Is this an idea worth exploring?

Does anyone have a good example code of something like this? Its intended for users that does not have a clue what a table is or how it works.

[yelvington]

I've seen two different approaches used in this situation.

1. As you described: Put some sort of tag directly in the text, and write a template processor to convert the tag into the appropriate HTML. In this approach, you might need to pass arguments to the tag (align=left, et cetera) or those might be properties of the images themselves (stored in a database).

2. Put no tags in the text, but rather relate the images to the text externally. In this approach, the viewer code would query an image database, find all images associated with a given text, and determine (from metadata stored in the image database) where to insert the images. This might be done by counting paragraphs, for example: Image X is left-aligned and goes in paragraph 4 and is 42 pixels by 11 and has a caption such-and-such, et cetera. All of this information would be external to the text and would be processed/converted/inserted algorithmically.

[Anon]

Any other ideas for this, I'm having the same problem...