Are you tired of your boring old special character censoring Instructions box? Well to solve at least a tiny part of this, I propose a WYSIWYG editor to be added to the Instructions and Notes and Credits boxes in projects powered by none other than the forum's formatting type, (watered down) BBCode.

What is WYSIWYG?
WYSIWYG is an acronym for “What You See Is What You Get”. It's a system that text editors use to show formatting live, like in Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Begone the days of the Preview button, WYSIWYG doesn't need it.

This does not mean that the formatting of Instructions will update live, as all live updates are handled client-side, and the client sends updates to the server in order to keep it up to date. The thing is people viewing these projects have to refresh if they want to see the updates.

This does not mean either that markup won't be usable. As long as the [b] and [/b] tags are there, they'll work. If you press backspace on text that wasn't edited with the WYSIWYG buttons, it'll go from Scratch! to [b]Scratch![/b

By “watered down”, how watered down is the Instructions box BBCode exactly?
Only the following BBCode would be allowed:

• Bold
  
• Italic
  
• Underline
  
• Strikethrough
  
• Links
  
• Centering
  
• Text Size (Big, Small)
  
• Colors
  
• Scratchblocks
  

If you use a BBCode tag that isn't in the allowed list, it won't work.
And yes, smileys are supported, you can't have BBCode without smilies.

Are images allowed?
No. Because Images are not in the allowed BBCode list, they will not work.
Why is this? Some projects are already resource-consuming, so to save resources, images are not supported.

Mockups
Made by SonicFanX123_321
In Editor


Preview

This could be a useful feature for making fancier descriptions. I think the live updates should be handled client-side, and the client would send updates to the server in order to keep it up to date. That would keep it from overloading the Scratch servers

king_of_fish wrote:

This could be a useful feature for making fancier descriptions. I think the live updates should be handled client-side, and the client would send updates to the server in order to keep it up to date. That would keep it from overloading the Scratch servers

Yeah, exactly. Client-side updates, that's what I was trying to say

Mmmm I'm sure the people into making aesthetically pleasing descriptions would love this. And it seems really useful. I only wonder how easy/hard would it be for the ST to add this.

I think to make things easier to implement and also be simpler, lists and color should be admitted. Lists can be workarounded by simply using a bullet point character, and color I fear would make the WYSIWYG editor too complex as then you'd need a color picker instead of a few buttons. Perhaps a link thing could be added as a replacement?

SavetheAtlantic wrote:

Lists can be workarounded by simply using a bullet point character. Perhaps a link thing could be added as a replacement?

I think they should be workarounded using minus signs instead, it's a more accessible workaround.

SavetheAtlantic wrote:

Color I fear would make the WYSIWYG editor too complex as then you'd need a color picker instead of a few buttons.

Personally I think color should be kept, color pickers come in all sizes and I think it should be around half the size of the Instructions box in width. And two more things: Scratch is all about learning and WYSIWYG editors are fairly simple but powerful, when I first used Word, I learnt how to color text in no time. Plus you can just take the costume editor's color picker and BAM, solved

bump

bump

bump

bump

bump

Semi-support. I think this could be very useful, but if this is implemented, I think that it should be an optional toggle, so that it doesn't ruin old projects. Also, I think that a responsive Markdown editor (as in, all characters are shown, but text between asterisks is italicized, etc.) would be better than rather than BBCode or a WYSIWYG editor.

DogCatPuppyLover wrote:

I think this could be very useful, but if this is implemented, I think that it should be an optional toggle

I mean it's more like a layer of formatting, like in HTML

DogCatPuppyLover wrote:

Also, I think that a responsive Markdown editor would be better than rather than BBCode or a WYSIWYG editor.

I think WYSIWYG is better, it's pretty simple to use and with markdown *this* turns into this and there's probably several projects with a word with an asterisk at start and end in Instructions or Notes and Credits that will randomly italicize

bump

bump

bump

bump

bump

bump

Why wouldn't [scratchblocks] be supported?