RadHtml unusable for non IT users

[Erwin]

Hi everyone,

In my company since our intranet (under MOSS 2007) has been launched past year, the contributors are experiencing many problems with RadEditor and more precisely with RadHtmlField control on publishing pages.
I want to be sure that the problems we have are common to everyone and not a specific issue linked to our environment.

 - First problem: Creating a new line is a nightmare for contributors. Pressing enter is not what the users are expecting. With a normal behavior, by pressing enter a user expects to have a new paragraph completely independant from the line above. But by pressing enter only <br /> are added and if the user choose to apply a bulleted list on the last paragrah he created, the buletted list is applied on all the paragraphs above...

Here is the code I have just by pressing "Enter" to have new paragraphs and applying bulleted list on the last one:

<span style="font-family: trebuchet ms; color: #666666;">
<ul>
    <li><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms; color: #666666;">This is a test paragraph with Enter
    <li>This is a second test paragraph with Enter</li>
    <li>This is a third test paragraph with Enter</li>
    <li>This is a fourth test paragraph with 2X Enter to jump a blank line</li>
    <li>This is a fifth paragraph for bulleted list</li>
    </span></li>
    <li></li>
</ul>
</span>

As you can see the code is not really clear and is wrong on some parts... The span elements are not wanted (the font and the color are automatically chosen) and nested within li elements which generates bad XHTML code. I also saw on this forum that CTRL+ENTER will normally solve the problem of new lines. So I do my previous example again by pressing CTRL+ENTER:

This is a test paragraph with CTRL+ENTER
<p>This is a second test paragraph with CTRL+ENTER</p>
<p>This is a third test paragraph with CTRL+ENTER</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
This is a fourth test paragraph with 2X CTRL+ENTER to jump a blank line
<p> </p>
<ul>
    <li>This is a fifth paragraph for bulleted list</li>
</ul>

Effectively, CTRL+ENTER is generating new paragraph, except that there is still some bugs. The 2X CTRL Jump is generating blank paragraph which are not visible to the user directly. He needs to click on HTML view and Design again to see the Jump line (when the user press CTRL+ENTER twice, the first end of line is generated but the second one is not displayed in design mode, the users need to go in html view and go back again in design view to see the blank line).
In addition the fourth test paragraph is not a paragraph apparently, just inline html text. The bulleted list is working since the user is selecting the entire line and then clicking on "bulleted list" button.

- Second problem: Creating an Heading 1 and then creating a new paragraph with CTRL+ENTER is not doing what the user is expecting. Indeed, the paragraph is generated into the <h1> tag and not below the element. For heading 1 it is necessary to type ENTER to be sure that the following text will be out of the <h1> tag. Not very easy to explain to the contributors regarding the first issue explained above...

- Other problem: The contributors also experienced many times problems with the copy past form word. Once the content has been correctly pasted into radhtml field, editing this content becomes a nightmare and every new line or style or bulleted list is breaking the design.

To conclude I'm just wondering if this is a problem with a particular version of RadEditor HTML field or if these are known problems. The version installed on our SharePoint farm is : 5.7.2.0. Don't know if the last version is fixing those problems but unfortunately I tried the 5.8.6.0 and it seems that the contributors experience is still confusing. If you can help me on this, I would appreciate.

[Stanimir]

Hi Erwin,

In the ticket you specify that you are using RadEditor for MOSS 1.56. You should know that we stopped enhancing this control a couple of years ago. So I suggest you upgrade to the latest version of RadEditor for MOSS, which now is 5.8.10:
Upgrade Instructions from version 4.x to version 5.x
Upgrading to a newer version of RadEditor for MOSS

For the first two problems I can suggest you set the NewLineBr property of RadEditor to false. In order to do this modify the ConfigFile.xml and ListConfigFile.xml, which are located in the /Program Files/Common Files/Microsoft Shared/web server extensions/wpresources/RadEditorSharePoint/5.x.x.0__1f131a624888eeed/Resources/ folder. Add the following line:

<property name="NewLineBr">false</property>

Review the following online help article: Set Properties Via Config File.

For the word problem review the following online resources:
 Cleaning Word Formatting,
http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet-ajax/editor/examples/cleaningwordformatting/defaultcs.aspx,
RadEditor.StripFormattingOptions Property

I think that you will find the information you need there.


Kind regards,
Stanimir
the Telerik team