Is there a true WYSIWIG editor for confluence?

Question

For our projects we post the APIs information: the issue is that confluence lose the indentation making it unreadable... and using a preformatted text, confluence does not allow to set some section in bold or color to show the changes to existing APIs...

There is no easy way to replace spaces with non breaking spaces... and inserting of non-breaking space at a time is super slow (even using copy/paste)...

It seems weird for a modern tool to not provide something that is WYSIWIG: I must be missing something.

Is there a simple way to do that? Or a workaround (maybe providing directly the HTML)? Or a different editor that can be used for confluence pages?

Thanks.

cv · Answer

I wasn't asking a general question, nor for feelings about it, but for "why is it so hard to do these simple things like that (ie: inserting "preformatted" text not as an html preformatted; inserting special charaters; selecting the font; having what I see in the "edit" and "view" mode be the same; editing tables with merged cells)? What I am missing? (ie: I'm sure the tool should be able to do these things, so it must be that I don't use the tool properly: any help?)"

Even the source editor provided in the tools is not user friendly  (the fact that it changes the formatting and contents of the html the user entered  is really annoying)... and if we have to got back to native html, what's the point?

I'm glad some users find they can do what they need with it... but we have been spending a lot more time doing clerical work since we moved from a non wysiwig wiki to confluence, and I would not have expected that.

So if there are better ways to setup or use confluence, or some kind of plugin to enhance the editor, I'd be happy to try it out.

Normann P_ Nielsen _Netic_ · Answer

Well, in generel I do not agree, I think the Editor is pretty damn nice 99% of the time - of course there are som flaws and stuff - but  I suppose in several cases it's not sufficient ..

If thing get messy, I use the "Source Editor" plugin to clean up

cv · Answer

For extremely basic editing, yes... but...

Try creating a table and insert code snippet in the cells and make sure the snippet keeps proper code indentation and coloring...

The indentation (horizontal and vertical) is sometime lost , sometime kept during the paste in the editor... but a preview or save shows all horizontal indentation are lost...  Trying to transform all paragraph changes into simple BR is time consuming (no mode to do that when pasting). Trying to recreate the indent using nbsp is almost impossible (no simple way to transform spaces in nbsp; or to insert npsc with one click)... It is also not possible to change the font to a monspace one.. and trying to use a preformatted paragraph does not allow to add colors.

Inserting HTML or editing the html is painful since saving the document does not keep it as-is, but transforms it...

Also (not a WYSIWYG issue, but...) the table editor is really hard to use as soon as you have some tables with merged cell in the first colon and you try adding rows and colons... what you get at each insert is never what you'd expect... as a result it takes forever to do some relatively simple edits...