Formatting text with a text editor within a website?

Question

Formatting text with a text editor within a website?

My wife wants to use her new iPad 2 to participate in an online community (Ravelry, a knitting and crocheting site). She does a great deal of posting to forums within this community. The text editor for posting in these forums allows users to format their text (bolding, italicize, etc.) as well as to link to other external and internal pages within the site (writers in the forum frequently link to patterns and project images within the site as references in their posts). When she attempts to use the text editor in Ravelry from her iPad, she is unable to select the text she wants to highlight and alter it (by bolding or making it a link). When we select the text, the only options are to copy or cut and we can't, once we've selected the text, tap on the "create a link" button in the text editor. We've tried to use both Safari and Atomic Web browsers, but no luck. Help?

iPad 2

Posted on Apr 18, 2011 12:11 PM

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Answer 1

Demo

Level 10

166,494 points

Apr 18, 2011 12:19 PM in response to stevenfromanchorage

When you tap in the text field on a portion of the text that you want to change, just hold down on the text until the magnifying glass appears. You should then get the option to Select, Select All or Paste. You can then select the text that you want to edit by dragging the blue dots to include all of the text she wants to change. Is this what she is doing?

You sort of half to get the hang of selecting text.

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Answer 2

Apr 18, 2011 12:46 PM in response to Demo

Well, we can select text, but when we do so we can't then choose to "bold" that text (with the text editor's button) or to make the selected text a link (again, with the text editor's button).

I'm looking at the options on the top of this text editor, for instance. Here I can write text, bold it, italicize it, underline it, strike through or even insert a link.

We can't figure out how to do alter the text in the same way with the iPad (I'm on my Mac Air right now). And to be clear, the problem is with using the formatting options on the internal text editor within the Ravelry site.

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Answer 3

Demo

Level 10

166,494 points

Apr 18, 2011 1:07 PM in response to stevenfromanchorage

So if I understand correctly, the buttons do not respond to your input - correct? If that's the case, it may be a function of the iPad not "playing nice" with that site and it's text editor. For instance, I do not even have the option of highlighting or changing text using my iPad as I am typing this response to you. All those wonderful formatting tools that you just used on your Mac Air do not work on the ipad ...the iPad will not display the text editor formatting tools except for a few brief seconds when using this site. (BTW... Nice work Apple on this one!)

Maybe you could contact the site developer or find a FAQ link on the site to find out if it is compatible with the iPad. The only other thing that may work, but I think it to be a long shot is to reset the iPad by holding on the sleep button and home button at the same time for about 10 seconds until the Apple logo appears and the iPad restarts. You could try again and see if that helps. It will not hurt anything and it might be worth a try. If you have tried different browsers, it just may be that it will not work with the iPad.

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Answer 4

alderud

Level 1

50 points

Apr 18, 2011 1:48 PM in response to stevenfromanchorage

Another option is to try Bespin:

https://bespin.mozillalabs.com/bookmarklet/

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Answer 5

pvonk

Level 6

13,851 points

Apr 18, 2011 1:55 PM in response to stevenfromanchorage

When I got my iPad 1 in December, I tried using it in the Bento forums (a subsidiary of Apple), but when I tried touching in the editor window, nothing happened - no keyboard. I emailed one of the tech support folks to report this. She replied that their web provider was aware of this and was working on it. A few weeks later, everything worked.

The moral of the story is that it may be the web site that needs to change its code, not the iPad.

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Answer 6

Apr 18, 2011 2:00 PM in response to stevenfromanchorage

ravelry.com is using WMD-Editor which is a WYWIWYM Markdown editor. Unfortunately it appears their chosen WYWIWYM Markdown editor is no longer or is pretty deprecated.

You as a user are not going to be able to swap out your own editor for use on any website...these editors are hard coded by the website developer...perhaps you could, as already suggested ask them to update to a more robust editor which supports today's standards. Though I doubt you will get far in having them swap out code for this.

A Solution:

Download an alternate browser such as iCabMobile for iOS...I tested ravelry against this browser and the editor does work but is pretty unstable. Funtional but not as intended. Safari cannot load this editor properly at all.

Log into your ravalry account and read their FAQ (http://www.ravelry.com/wiki/pages/UsingTheTextEditor#formatting_bolditalic_lists _and_other_basics)

Simple BBCODE commands for formatting where you do not need to even use the tool bar work fine...just a hassle to memorize.

Hope this helps.

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