Update: Today we tried getting rid of all markdown from the Rich Text editor, and:
a) immediately found it pretty infuriating to not be able to quickly insert headers, quotes, and bullet lists, as well as to occasionally do some of the more obscure markdown things.
b) we’re pretty confident that removing the parsing of * and _ to determine italics and bold will solve most of the issues (and italics and bold can easily be done via ctrl-b and ctrl-i, so it’s not as crucial). There may be some remaining issues for pasting in entire markdown documents, but this is better suited for the new markdown editor anyway.
c) in the future, we’ll likely want to include some LessWrong-specific functionality in the editor, and it seemed likely that it’d be easier to do so using the markdown editor as a base than building things from scratch. In general it seemed better to refine issues with the markdown editor which is easier if we’re actually using it.
So, we pushed that update earlier today. If you run into particular issues let us know.
Re: Bold Text
The biggest remaining issue people have complained about is that copying and pasting text from the site results in bold text which is super annoying. We have diagnosed the problem, which is that when our editor copies text, it considers font-weight of 500 or more to be “bold”. We’re attempting to get a PR merged with the editor framework to fix this. Will see how it goes.
Update: Today we tried getting rid of all markdown from the Rich Text editor, and:
a) immediately found it pretty infuriating to not be able to quickly insert headers, quotes, and bullet lists, as well as to occasionally do some of the more obscure markdown things.
b) we’re pretty confident that removing the parsing of * and _ to determine italics and bold will solve most of the issues (and italics and bold can easily be done via ctrl-b and ctrl-i, so it’s not as crucial). There may be some remaining issues for pasting in entire markdown documents, but this is better suited for the new markdown editor anyway.
c) in the future, we’ll likely want to include some LessWrong-specific functionality in the editor, and it seemed likely that it’d be easier to do so using the markdown editor as a base than building things from scratch. In general it seemed better to refine issues with the markdown editor which is easier if we’re actually using it.
So, we pushed that update earlier today. If you run into particular issues let us know.
Re: Bold Text
The biggest remaining issue people have complained about is that copying and pasting text from the site results in bold text which is super annoying. We have diagnosed the problem, which is that when our editor copies text, it considers font-weight of 500 or more to be “bold”. We’re attempting to get a PR merged with the editor framework to fix this. Will see how it goes.