[TYPO3-RTE] Display nonprinting characters?

[Silke Arend]

Hi Sacha,

> Hi,
> 
> I currently have a some problems with the HTMLareas as things like
> <h3></h3> or <p><strong></strong></p> are created when editors write
> text and modify it without care.

I saw that happen more than once, too! My personal solution is to change to html-view. But this is for sure not a solution for users who are glad to be able to edit pages without knowing html.

> 
> In OOffice or Word you can turn on the display of non-printing chars
> like carriage returns, linebreaks etc.. Could this be included into
> HTMLarea? I think it could help editors to modify text correctly without
> creating wrong markup.

I am pretty sure that a lot of MS Word users don't know the meaning of those signs. Otherwise not as many Word documents would look that bad in that perspective.

What I mean by that: Showing the source code or signs (as in Word) would not help "mainstream users". May be after hitting save, empty block elements could be marked and the choice being offered to leave them or to change them to <br>. The second best suggestion would be to change any empty block element into <br> (or <br />) automatically. Maybe there is already a configuration option for this?

In both cases the user would most likely need to add, as a second step, some extra <br> to prodruce the same space height. 

The most elegant way would be to not produce / accept empty block elements in the first place. Unfortunately I have no idea if and how that could be done.

Enjoy your weekend!

Silke