You know that thing you type into to make a blog entry that shows you what’s bold and what’s underlined? That’s a rich text editor or RTE. I’ve been working on building a cross browser one (IE and Mozilla) and wanted to share the most helpful resources I’ve come across after hours of trying to sort through the vastness that is rich text editing.
HTMLarea RTE Depository · This is going to be your main depository of RTE’s out there. Some are good. Some are not.
IE Javascript Editor · This is an extremely basic editor but was helpful in getting me started. Big drawback is that it works in IE only.
RTWedit · Not a bad editor but the use of a popup windows is a small drawback in my opinion.
Kevin Roth’s Editor · Kevin Roth designed this very nice editor. His code is free, but the functions that change the html to xhtml are not free commercially.
TinyMCE · Another free editor for the individual. I believe they’ve implemented a version for WordPress and Textpattern using this code.
Microsoft · Info about editing and commands for IE.
Mozilla · Info about editing and commands for Gecko based browsers.
Mozilla RTE Demo · Take this Mozilla demo, mix it with the basic IE version and you got yourself a cross browser editor.
tinyMCE is a great cross browser editor. I have used it in several projects.
I agree. The only knock I have on tinyMCE is the insertion of unwanted spaces and divs into some of the html.
A great .NET cross browser compatible editor for .NET is the R.A.D. Editor from Telerik (http://www.telerik.com) but it costs.
Also, check out Free Text Box, also for .NET, that’s opensource… http://www.freetextbox.com
Unfortunately the tinyMCE I tried didn’t work with Opera. Cross browser is tricky.
Here’s another one I found by Paul James that I’ve tested on IE and Firefox. On top of that it’s under the BSD licence with allows you to do pretty much what you want.