By offal on

I'm trying out Drupal 5 and have installed FCKeditor. I have made 'Full HTML' the default for creating new pages. Most things work well, but when creating a table and submitting the page, the table does not appear as it did in the edit page. Tables stretched across the whole field, even when the width is specified. As mentioned, the table looks great during editing, but in the preview and after submitting it's not right.
What am I doing wrong?

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

ontwerpwerk’s picture

ontwerpwerk commented

Nothing wrong, you just ran into the fable of WYSIWYG .. what you see is usually not what you get (WYSIUNWYG)

While editing you are looking at the content you're creating with a different stylesheet than while browsing. You can edit the stylesheet in FCKeditor to match the styleheet of the theme you are using, but even then the results may vary. (the stylesheet to modify is ./modules/fckeditor/fckeditor/editor/css/fck_editorarea.css)

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I work for Ontwerpwerk

offal’s picture

offal commented

LOL (WYSIUNWYG). Thanks for explaining that - I had no idea that the stylesheet may have something to do with it (I'm just a beginner). I'm relieved and concerned at the same time - relived because I didn't do anything wrong, concerned because I don't know enough (if anything) about stylesheets to pick out which bit to edit for the tables. Would it not be better to edit the stylesheet of my theme, so that the table displays correctly rather than matching the FCKedit to the theme stylesheet in which case the edit page will not be able to do the table I want? I just don't know enough about it.... Would love to learn though. Are there other ways of fixing this? Is it hard to fix?

offal’s picture

offal commented

I've noticed that the tables display correctly with other themes. Is there a way to convince the Garland theme to display the tables correctly, the way they appeared in FCKeditor?

Does anyone know how to correct the appropriate stylesheet ?

ontwerpwerk’s picture

ontwerpwerk commented

The garland theme is very complicated and handles tables in its own way, the FCKeditor does handle tables in its own way also (extra borders and handles for editing) so both ways will probably always be different. If you want to control either you will need extensive knowledge of CSS, JavaScript and the ways the different browsers handle the interaction between those and the normal HTML and DOM.

Solving this class of problems can easily take days, and unfortunately I don't have that much time to spare - I can only wish you luck, or recommend you scale down your ambition. Is it absolutely neccessary that they look the same in both the page and the editor? If not, live with a reasonable compromise and you'll win a lot of hours.

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I work for Ontwerpwerk

offal’s picture

offal commented

Thanks so much for your reply and advice. I certainly don't have extensive knowledge of any of this. I guess the best I can do is to, as you said, find a way around using tables. Perhaps one day there will be a more easy way of doing it.

offal’s picture

offal commented

Bump, if a may :)

EDIT: ontwerpwerk's reply makes me think I should think of a different way, rather than using tables. How else can I position items on a page? I guess my thinking is still stuck in the old html page ages.