Markdown wysiwyg

[youssefOuahalou]

Hello everyone. Is it possible to add Markdown for wysiwyg at Dataverse?

[mheppler]

@youssefOuahalou, is this PrimeFaces TextEditor component what you had in mind for WYSIWYG?

There is an older issue, Metadata + Terms - Support Markdown syntax #4647, that has a similar request to support markdown.

[mheppler]

@youssefOuahalou, in order for the application to properly support a change to TextEditor component, we will need to review and refactor or rewire how HTML and other special characters are supported in metadata fields.

Some of the outstanding issues we need to review in more detail when discussing metadata are:

• Publishing fails when dataset contains HTML entities such as   #3328
• Use unescaped versions of ampersand, greater than and less than symbols in RIS files #4123

While looking into the code in your developer question in issue #6407, I tested out this new TextEditor component and discovered that it does not support HTML.

Because of this issue, simply changing the metadata field form input component will not be enough to add this feature. As @djbrooke has pointed out in previous comments, we will need to take the time necessary to review all the changes to metadata support needed.

[youssefOuahalou]

Thank you very much for your comment, I understand from now on. Do you want me to close the issue?

[mheppler]

@youssefOuahalou let's leave this issue open for the moment. When our team is ready to begin research on this feature, we can review all of the issue together, and consolidate them as needed. This will also provide time for the community to provide additional feedback on any of these topics.

[BPeuch]

I want to flesh out this request/suggestion of Youssef and ours at the State Archives of Belgium. It proceeds from a personal preference, I have to admit. But I also think that a very large percent of Dataverse users don't know about HTML, or don't know how to use it, or don't want to use it. Hence the idea of a layout feature toolbar.

I, personally, greatly enjoy formatting. I find neatly designed bibliographies elegant, with the titles in italics, the chapters between quote marks, the indentations straight and regular. But I know most people don't particularly care for all this, hence the success of tools like Zotero. I should even say that most of my fellow students, back when I was a student myself, dreaded the perspective of having to compile bibliographic sources, while I was very excited at the prospect.

Maybe it's not the best example however. The bibliography is a very specific kind of text after all, not one most people will want, or rather have to, write in their life. Another, perhaps more revealing use case is that of online forums.

Now there are countless forums where people will mostly write minimally formatted texts, with neither italics nor boldface nor underlining… I saw that back in the days when I was looking for online occurrences for a linguistic assignment mostly on computer technology forums.

That being said, there are so many other forums where formatting abounds, too. I'm thinking roleplay (RP) forums, where you could say users have minimal but actual literary pretensions (one might say, more kindly, aspirations). For that reason, these ysers often take on editorial prerogatives as wel: many of them in my experience will spend a lot of time formatting, arranging, designing their posts, their character sheets, the layout of their narratives.

Demographically speaking I have to say, those forums are mostly frequented by millenials. There are exceptions, but exceptions they are. So maybe that age-wise the bulk of (social) scientists around the world (and researchers in other disciplines, too) likely can't care too much for things like fancy layout features, titles in italics and what have you.

Maybe not however: we recently launched at the State Archives of Belgium a small who's who Web application, with which users can look up information about (especially) our scientific personnel and learn more about this or that historian's specialties, consult their list of publications, their research projects, etc.

Well, a short while after the app was launched, several users wrote to our compter development department requesting that a toolbar be included in the field for publications of the who's who so that researchers can use italics, hyperlinks, dynamic lists, and so on. I don't know exactly who requested this or in what proportions, but considering the average age of those history researchers who work in the archives, I'd say even people who were born before 1985 expressed an interest in such formatting functionalities, to the point where it was included (so it had to be more than just two people).

Youssef and I initially had WYSIWYG in mind, and I think that's the most user-friendly approach. However, the roleplay forums I mentioned usually don't include this feature: they have a toolbar, just like here on GitHub, but likewise the text appears with tags — usually BBCode, so things like [i]italics[/i], [s]strikethrough[/s] and so on (and, just like on GitHub, there are preview tools).

Late-generation forum services like Xenforo's offer stunning features like WYSIWYG as well as built-in text savers (so if you close your browser by mistake, you'll be able to retrieve the lost text). But Xenforo is unfortunately not free. And I think basic layout features that add tags to the text, as long as they come with a previewer, are just fine anyway.