Format your messages with the WYSIWYG editor

Description

Should I have the WYSIWYG editor On or OFF? See the difference as we compare the two options side by side.

Length

9 min 22 secs

Transcript

Presenting Your Post

The way in which you present your post can have a big effect on response.

It's particularly important if you are selling something or wanting to buy something, or perhaps you have a problem to solve and you want other people to be interested and excited about your message and hopefully respond.

So today we're going to have a look at what's called the WYSIWYG editor, What You See Is What You Get.

That helps you format your message and present it in an interesting manner.

Two Members with Different Settings

So we've got two members here, each with their WYSIWYG editor in a different setting.

The one on the left, he has his WYSIWYG on, and the one on the right has it off.

And the WYSIWYG button is controlled by two things, a setting in your profile and this button, the last button on the right, on this bar.

Now normally this bar is on one line. This bit here doesn't wrap around, that's only because I've got these two windows on the screen at the same time.

So normally this bar will be out here, and it's the last button there, and if I mouse over it says 'Toggle WYSIWYG', and likewise if I go over here it says 'Toggle WYSIWYG'.

And this one's coloured white for off, and this one's coloured grey for on.

WYSIWYG setting in Your Profile

So let's have a look at the other setting that controls the WYSIWYG, and that's in our profile.

So we'll go into this fellow's profile, now I got here by going up to the profile, clicking on look and layout, so here we are in look and layout, forum profile, and we scroll down, setting load editor in WYSIWYG mode by default, ticked on, and if we did the same thing for this fellow his would be ticked off.

So all that does is control what's loaded up when you first start a new topic, that's the default mode for your WYSIWYG editor, but you can toggle it on or off at any time by clicking on the button.

So we toggle that off, and he gets a similar look to that fellow over there, I'll just make him the same, and we can toggle this fellow on, and he gets a similar look.

We'll put them back to their previous state.

Formatting with WYSIWYG On And Off

Okay so let's do some formatting and see what happens.

Let's say this is our heading here, 'What You See Is What You Get', and we want to make it bold perhaps.

So we'll triple click on that and highlight the whole thing, and we'll go up to the bold button here, and we single left click on that, and we can see it immediately turns bold.

Now we'll go over to the one where the fellow has his WYSIWYG off.

So we'll triple left click on that, we go up to the button and make it bold, and what we see are the BB codes, the Bulletin Board codes that create this bolder look.

So this fellow is getting a real time look at how his formatting is evolving.

So let's try another one over here.

Or let's say, because it's a heading, he wants to make it a bit bigger, so we'll go up here to this one which sets the font size, so we'll single left click on that, we get to choose some sizes, let's say he wants to make it size 4.

So immediately he sees a size 4 font, do the same thing on the window with it off, go up to size, single left click on that, choose 4, and we see the extra tags have been added on but we don't get to see it in real time.

So let's try another one, what about some color?

So we'll triple left click on that, where's the color here, font color, single left click on that, we'll have a blue, and we'll go over to where the WYSWYG is off, go to the font color, single left click, blue.

So you can see again we just have the tags here, and while over here we have the blue font.

Now we could continue on doing whatever we want to here, and you can see down here they both have the same image, then they've inserted it, and in this fellows we get a real time look at it, and in this fellows we don't.

We can make the window a little bit bigger, it doesn't go that far but improves things a bit.

Ok, now both people can preview their image and get the same thing, so let's just have a look at that, this fellow previews, and up the top he sees what his message will look like, and this fellow can do the same thing, and up the top he sees what his message is like.

So you can still see the end effect, it's just that this fellow gets to see it in real time, it's the only real difference.

Advantage of WYSIWYG Off

One advantage of having the WYSWYG editor off and being able to see the bulletin board code is that gradually you learn what the Bulletin Board code does.

It's a very simple format, let's just look at this first one here, the one that made it bold, the B and the slash B at the end.

So Bulletin Board code consists of two pairs of brackets, an opening pair and a closing pair, or tags as they're called.

In here just the letter B signifies what comes next, make that bold.

Then when we get to this pair of brackets we've got a forward slash and a B. That says ok, that's the end of the bold, from here on we'll resume normal font.

And as you can see you can stack code, so here we've got a size equals 4 and a size equals 4 closing tag, this could be size equals 3 or 6 or whatever, and colour equals blue, that could be colour equals red, whatever.

The advantage is that you gradually learn and because you can use the preview you can always preview it.

But where it really comes in handy is when things get in a mess, which can happen with a post, and so you can go in and clean up the tags and sort out the mess.

Sometimes with quotes, tags go astray.

I find that happens with the WYSIWYG editor on in particular.

So being able to turn it off, go in, fix the codes, it can be a very handy thing.

Advantage of WYSIWYG On

On the other side of the ledger, having the WYSIWYG editor on is very handy when you're inserting attachments.

So this fellow inserted his attachment, I'll just do another one here, so we click anywhere in this bar area here, and we'll select number 8 say, we'll open it, loads up, we want to insert it.

Now we put the cursor where we want the insertion to happen, say there, single left click on the blue arrow, enter the size which is 300 which is what I'm using for this demonstration, and then we click on the insert button.

It immediately loads it in, we know we've got the right size, the insertion's happened okay, and we don't need to preview, we can just continue on with our message.

So that's a very handy tool, and this fellow wouldn't see that.

He would just see this line, which is I suppose is equally useful because if you can read it you can see that width equals 300, so that's how it's going to appear.

CONCLUSION

As I mentioned earlier, most people will have their WYSIWYG button in their profile set to off, because that's the way it's always been.

The previous WYSIWYG editor wasn't as good as this one.

You may want to try it out, and you can either toggle it on using this end button here, and or set it in your profile.

But ultimately it just depends on what you want and whether you like to use formatting or not.

It can take a little time to get used to, but it really is handy for improving the readability of your posts.