EBMS Tickets

While it would be ideal to make improvements as described above, we know that at least some of the editing software was out-of-the-box from Drupal, so we may not have much control over these options. If that's the case, perhaps there are tips you could share with us to improve the handling of lists, spacing, etc.

I did an experiment to see if Word could be induced to produce something more useful than with cut and paste. I tried saving as plain text and HTML.

But Word is pretty recalcitrant. The plain text lost the indentations that were in the original and inserted a non-ascii character for the single quote mark, and the HTML wrapped 101 characters of test text with 21,721 characters of exotic HTML markup.

Just sayin' ...

Just wanted to add some comments from our conversation yesterday.

It wouldn't be worthwhile modifying the editing software because any changes would be wiped out with any Drupal refresh.

However, one tip that was offered is to use "styles" in Word to format things like our agendas, travel text, etc. as opposed to manually creating white space by hitting Enter, tab, space bar, etc. We'll experiment with this. Once we use Word's styles, if we still aren't getting what we expect on these pages, Bob/Alan could adjust the CSS to interpret the styles differently than they are currently doing.

Bob/Alan, please feel free to correct and/or add to this to capture what is/isn't feasible and any other suggestions you have. Thanks.

I believe your description of the best way to proceed is right.

I have tried using Styles to format my agenda and I can see how Styles could really help with formatting the outline portion of our agendas (see https://ebms-dev.nci.nih.gov/node/366?boards=). I'm having trouble formatting the rest of the agenda - the title, meeting information, etc.). I will attach the document I'm working with. Any tips you have would be welcomed. Thank you!

Right off the bat, I can see that we're trying to stuff 10 pounds of potatoes into a 5-pound sack. We've never supported tables in the rich-text editing. Have you considered a Word document (or a PDF) to the event? That way, you can have all the formatting you want, with complete control over every detail. The WYSIWYG editor plugin was set up for much simpler documents.

Ignoring the table for now, what styles would you suggest we use for the text at the top of the agenda (the title of the meeting, room, WebEx information)?

It's great being able to use the agenda field for this - it gives us the ability to place items on the agenda in draft form far in advance of the meeting and our Board members receive notifications when the agenda is published, so I'd like to continue using it as opposed to uploading a Word or PDF file instead.

The news from my preliminary investigations is not good. Somewhere along the way, content which is represented as (possibly nested) lists in Microsoft Word is being converted in the WYSIWYG Drupal field to a sequence of paragraphs with varying levels of indentation when the Import From Word icon is used. I need to do some further digging to find out where this is happening, and (we hope) prevent it.

The updated WYSIWYG editor has solved some of these problems and we've decided not to make further enhancements at this time, so I'm closing this ticket.