New WYSIWYG Editor: Beta Testing Feedback

[ssddanbrown]

This is a thread specifically to collect feedback regarding issues and limitations of the new WYSIWYG editor, introduced in BookStack v24.10, during its beta phase which starts as of BookStack v25.05. This follows on from thread #5245.

This below list will be continuously updated from feedback to form a full listing to be worked on.
Please only report issues where not already in this list.
Generally our goal is to match the existing TinyMCE based editor as close as possible.

Known Issues

To be added

[joshhcd]

1. One thing that I recently added to our instance was the PDF embedding script - I haven't tried to modify the script to function on the new editor, but there is currently no way to embed a PDF into the page. Maybe their file import/export feature? though I haven't tried this.

2. Another thing that we like to use (though I will note, it's not officially supported, but with a small code tweak, you can add the functionality to the original wysiwyg editor) is the alphabet bullet list. While I understand it's not officially supported, the sheer capabilities of tinymce allow extended customization that BookStack does not include out of the box.

Lexical does not currently support more than 3 out of the box solutions as sited in this issue.
facebook/lexical#6327

3. Lastly, assuming that the choice to add lexical is inevitable regardless of issues, can we look into including more out of the box functions through their addons and plugins? Such as dragon naturally speaking,

[ssddanbrown]

@joshhcd

1. PDFs could technically be embedded via iframe/embed/object elements, which we do support in the new editor. This is something we could make easier (like we do for adding video attachments), but official support for that is outside the scope of this thread. I have not yet exposed any internals for customization/extensibility, that is probably something I start to plan out later in this beta stage, to emulate some of the common abilities of the TinyMCE editor.

2. As above in regards to extensibility, although some of this may be achievable via css and external customization (especially as this is just a visual/style difference to ordered lists, which we do support). I wouldn't consider too much about what Lexical supports for the reasons stated in the next point.

3. I would not look to add more for the sake of it showing in lexical examples or the list of available modules. If there's reason to add something that can be raised via it's own worth/need, otherwise the scope will remain limited. With lexical, what you might see in their example is not things we have, or can directly, use. I have forked some core parts of the editor. All of the UI, many of the format types and much of the behaviour has been written custom from scratch by me, to emulate our existing editor as best as possible while not having to rely on the same frameworks/libraries (like React) which they use within their ready-provided implementations. I've also made customizations to the core elements as part of our fork. This is quite a different and extensive approach compared to what we had with TinyMCE, giving us more control (at the cost of maintenance and effort), but it does mean that much of what you may see elsewhere with lexical is irrelevant, at least relative to how you might have previously referred to TinyMCE guidance for prior options/customization/extension since we worked upon a standard provided library as-is there.

[svennd]

Since this is still in "beta", are feature requests possible ?

• inline code (perhaps its already possible)
• de code button as one of the default buttons ? (or make this a setting?)

Our use case includes allot of system paths, code snippets and configuration examples, therefor we use it way more then for example aligning center/right/justify.

[ssddanbrown]

@svennd Inline code is already possible via a button in the overflow of the inline formats menu (or alternatively via shortcut):

The purpose of the current phase is to match the existing editor, I'm not looking to move things around or add features but we can think about that in the future after the default editor switch has occurred.