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Text Editor Issues

J
Rank

When I am creating Solution Articles, most of the time the text editor is nearly impossible to work with. The font will be fine for half or most of the article, and then the rest of it is completely different, even if I go in and edit the HTML directly. I have tried highlighting the entire article and making changes as well as highlighting individual paragraphs. Sometimes if there is bold and or italics in the paragraph, the formatting will stay fine right up to that, then forget it. We use the "Heading 2" and "Paragraph" for all of our articles with Verdana font, medium-sized, and black in color. Most of the time we also include images as they are mostly KB articles for employees. 


Does anyone else have this problem? Is there any way to get a better quality text editor? Other than this issue, we love the product, it's just so frustrating as I am the one migrating almost all of our articles from our old system to Freshservice.


Thanks!


Jess


This topic has been closed for comments

28 replies

E
Rank

We noticed this issue as well. We've had more problems in Internet Explorer than in Chrome, but there are still issues as listed in the OP.


J
Rank

Is there any update on this? We are still very frustrated with the ability, or lack there of, to edit solution articles quickly. This can sometimes take a good amount of time to format everything, as sometimes the formatting doesn't stick at all, even if you removed the HTML and add type it in yourself. We would really like to say that this is a good tool as we use it often and are trying to maintain strict formatting rules across the board so articles are more appealing to employees and customers. 


R
Rank

The lack of WYSIWYG when working with the editor is disturbing. I'm spending way too much time editing articles.


S
Rank
I am getting very frustrated with this issue too. Sometimes I can control the size and format, sometimes I cannot. Bold, italic and text colors are more reliable for me than font size.

Font size is important to getting staff to look at the content - if it is too small, it will be ignored. And this defeats the purpose of adding content to the knowledge base.

I am not too good with editing format in HTML so I am not sure if the problem can be resolved that way. Any ideas?

I have been working in Chrome. I just changed over to Firefox, which seems to be more problematic.

Has anyone tried Edge yet, or Safari?

 


C
Rank

I am also experiencing the same issues, i have raised a support ticket and apparently this is a known issue.


I have been told a fix should be ready within the next 3-4 weeks.


D
Rank

I don't know whether to classify the following comments as a "problem" or a feature request.


The editor for Solutions is terrible and I don't understand why. The formatting of the output is inconsistent and when I look at the HTML I can see why -- the text is excessively marked up with all sorts of complex tags and structure.


I would like a simple and elegant editor that consistently produces nicely formatted output. Confluence and Mediawiki would be examples of what I mean.


Thanks.


DK.


J
Rank

Ah, I chose to classify this as a problem because the text editor "feature" already exists, it is just not very good! 


Chris Came mentioned 3 months ago that the solution for this would be released in "the next 3-4 weeks" but I have yet to see any improvements.


Any info or updates would be awesome!

C
Rank

Hi Jess,


Im still waiting for a resolution, its been very quiet. I have sent numerous chasers but unfortunately no reply.


At the moment as you probably experience, creating solutions/knowledge articles is a absolute nightmare!


Any update would be great!!


J
Rank

I just spoke to someone at Freshservice - he said it is still in progress, and they are unsure when it will officially be resolved. I tried to put a little rush-rush on it, but it doesn't look like they have been in a rush with multiple complaints about it so far, so I am not convinced it will go a long way. 


I tried formatting a Word document, saving it as a web page, editing it in notepad to grab the html/css for it to paste in the html editor and that didn't work either! When I went away from the HTML editor back to just the text, it looked BEAUTIFUL! Then I saved it, and when I viewed it, it all went away; turns out, saving it stripped all the custom styling I had pasted in. Shucks!


I am wondering if anyone has had any success with formatting (even through HTML). I really believe that a good standard formatting template for articles would make them more user-friendly and pleasing to the eye. 

J
Rank
The editor is bad enough that nobody in our organization wants to use it which means our documentation is becoming scattered between Freshservice and Sharepoint *gasp*.  This is one particular piece of Freshservice that I think is a serious failure.

 


C
Rank

Happy New Year All!


I have been notified by the Fresh Service Support Team this issue has now been resolved. I have created some new solutions/articles and the fix seems to have worked.


For existing solutions, i have highlighted the text changed the font from small to medium, then back to small and clicked update, the fix is then applied to the existing article. No more formatting issues!!


Hope this helps.


J
Rank

Happy New Year! Thanks for the update, Chris! 


I just created a few articles and tried my hardest to break them. I know that it's not likely that anyone on my team will go in and go format crazy like I just did, but I needed to be sure. For the most part, everything worked really well. It's nothing fancy, but it does the job much better than before. 


I did find one annoying little thing though - 


I formatted 3 lines in a row as paragraph text, one line at a time. The top two lines were fine, but the third line actually had two span tags around it (seen below). When I viewed the updated article, the font was grey instead of black, even though the outer-most span included the rgb for black (0, 0, 0). When I re-formatted that line to have black text again, the rgb piece moved from the outer-most span to the inner one. 



First off, I really want to know why/how there are two separate spans there, especially when there isn't a space or anything. Secondly, it seems as though the outer span is cancelled out by the inner one, which I am not convinced is how it should behave. 


Maybe it's just me here, but I saw silly little things like that happening before this fix on top of the bigger, more irritating bugs. I know it may be asking a lot, but I really think it would be nice to be able to create an article once and not have to go in and fix random formatting blips here and there.


Can anyone else destroy an article and prove me wrong? I'd love to hear what everyone else sees now!


Best, Jess. 


J
Rank

Happy New Year! Thanks for the update, Chris!


I experienced a minor issue with the span tags, but I am going to have the rest of my team test the formatting themselves and report our findings back to Freshservice. Has anyone else given this a shot and found anything? 


Don't get me wrong, it has improved drastically and I am glad! I just don't want to have to keep going back and forth to edit silly little formatting blips here and there. 


K
Rank
While these fixes are nice, I still feel that solutions are lacking significant functionality. In an effort to provide a "one stop shop," we are using the portal as our full employee intranet with solutions making up much of our content. The lack of features is really limiting our ability to provide meaningful content. I'd like to see a more robust and user friendly editor, perhaps one akin to Wordpress.
J
Rank

I second that. I was just working with a pretty large solution covering an entire new system our development team has created. I am going through and trying to format the entire thing for our users, and it is giving me one heck of a time. 


Just as a quick example of what I am seeing is - I had a bulleted list that was appearing completely squished together, so in an effort to separate the bullets a little, I formatted each point's text as paragraph. Every time I clicked to format it, it created a new bullet point below. Also, there are random lines here and there that are grey text instead of black, even though I formatted the entire document with black text. 


All in all, it is really still pretty messy. It is not cooperative or consistent, and it causes more work in most cases than it ever should be. There are many more text editors out there that offer more functionality and are not as messy as this Redactor WYSIWYG one is getting us. 


Still hopeful, 

Jess


J
Rank

Hello - 




The text editor issue is still extremely irritating and we are constantly creating new articles. This has been open for quite some time now, and I have at least one ticket open with Freshservice that has been open for months and months now. 




Quite honestly, it is a waste of our time to have to mess around with the html when trying to fix the ridiculous bugs in the editor OR to have to copy, delete, and paste the plain text back into the editor and start from scratch. Sometimes this is necessary as the text editor adds so many unnecessary tags around the text that the formatting for the entire article becomes messy. 




Please provide us with an update on the status of this as soon as possible. 




PS. The default font color should not be grey.


J
Rank

After NUMEROUS comments in this particular post, I feel strongly that Freshservice is no longer concerned with this issue. I have a ticket open with this as well, and despite my efforts to get a response, no one seems to be reacting. 




Our company is really trying to work towards building up our Knowledge Base; I, myself, create at least one article a day now, and this formatting thing is really getting irritating. 




In the screenshot below, I selected the entire article and chose Verdana, Medium, and black font color. If someone could explain to be why the font coloring for the numbered list is not all black, that would be fantastic because I cannot think of a good reason for that to happen. 








Lastly, maybe it is just me, but the fact that the numbered list (happens with bullets as well) text is so smooshed together is absurd. 




Remaining hopeful that this text editor will become not-so-stressful some day...




Thanks, 


Jess


C
Rank

I also have problems with random formatting happening, usually it switches to multi-line spacing halfway down a Solution or even a Reply in a ticket, for no apparent reason.




I have found that clearing all formatting once I have finished typing and then applying the formatting seems to work, however this is only OK if doing a new solution rather that updating an existing one where I don't want to have to re-do all the formatting.


rajagopal.baladhandayutham
Userlevel 4
Badge +5

Hello,




We are really sorry for the delayed response.




We are working towards a fix for the issues with Text editor and it is currently in development and should be available by Q1 2017.




Rajagopal || Freshworks Community
J
Rank

Just so everyone is aware (maybe someone might be interested in doing this themselves) - I redesigned our customer portal, and in the process, I modified the styling for the Solution Articles. Now, we no longer have to select a font size, font color, or font family; it just does it on its own! The only thing we do for formatting is heading styles, bold/italics, and font color only if a section should be a different color! Works great so far... 




I'd be happy to share my code if anyone is fed up like me!


D
Rank

@Jess I'd like to see what you did. Thanks.


J
Rank

Sure! I created a class on the page called "articlebody" so that I didn't have to inherit the font stylings from the rest of the page... 


/*ARTICLE BODY FONTS*/

.articlebody {

  font-family: "Verdana", Times, serif;

  font-size: 16px;

  color: #000; 

}



.articlebody h1{

  font-family: "Verdana", Times, serif;

  font-size: 18px;

  color: #0099e6;

  font-weight: bold;

  text-transform: uppercase;

}



.articlebody h2{

   font-family: "Verdana", Times, serif;

   font-size: 16px;

   color: #0099e6;

   font-weight: normal;

   text-transform: uppercase;

   border-bottom: 1px solid #0099e6;

   margin: 5px 0px 10px;

}



.articlebody h3{

   font-family: "Verdana", Times, serif;

   font-size: 16px;

   color: #0077b3;

   font-weight: bold;

}



.articlebody h4{

   font-family: "Verdana", Times, serif;

   font-size: 16px;

   color: #0077b3;

   font-weight: bold;

   text-decoration: underline;

}



.articlebody p{

   font-family: "Verdana", Times, serif;

   font-size: 16px;

   color: #000;

}



.articlebody ul {

  list-style-type: square;

  list-style-position: inside;

  margin: 0;

  float: left;

  padding: 0 0 0 22px;

}



.articlebody ul li{

  list-style-type: square;

  list-style-position: inside;

  margin: 0;

  padding: 0 0 0 22px;

}



.articlebody ol {

   list-style-type: decimal;

   list-style-position: inside;

}

/*END FONTS*/


 Let me know if you have any questions! Sometimes the bullet points display inline, but a) not always and b) I haven't had a chance to really take a good look at it!


K
Rank
Any word on this text editor fix? I still have problems with it.
N
Rank

This has been by far one of the most frustrating aspects of using Freshservice for Solution/Knowledge management.




Something as simple as adding an unordered list to a Solution article has often resulted in half a day's worth of work:




  • Reformatting the article

  • Making sure it's aligned with our other articles

  • Hopefully not messing anything else up along the way.








It seems this issue is ripe for being fixed immediately based on the amount of users experiencing the same issue, the duration for which this issue has been open, however, experience tells me this will 'be passed along to the team'.




-another frustrated Solutions manager


J
Rank

Here is an updated look at the css we are using on our portal. Basically, what this is doing, is making it so that the only thing we need to format are the headings and the bulleted/numbered lists. The color, the font, the sizes, and the spacing is all handled through our stylesheet. 




Make sure you wrap the content of the article in a class="articlebody" wrapper like this...


<div class="articlebody">

    <article>

        {{ article.body }}

    </article>

</div>




 And, here is the css..


/* Article Body Fonts */

.articlebody {

  font-family: "Verdana", Times, serif;

  font-size: 16px;

  color: #000; }



.articlebody h1 {

  font-family: "Verdana", Times, serif;

  font-size: 18px;

  color: #0099e6;

  font-weight: bold;

  text-transform: uppercase; }



.articlebody h2 {

  font-family: "Verdana", Times, serif;

  font-size: 16px;

  color: #0099e6;

  font-weight: normal;

  text-transform: uppercase;

  border-bottom: 1px solid #0099e6;

  margin: 5px 0px 10px; }



.articlebody h3 {

  font-family: "Verdana", Times, serif;

  font-size: 16px;

  color: #0077b3;

  font-weight: bold; }



.articlebody h4 {

  font-family: "Verdana", Times, serif;

  font-size: 16px;

  color: #0077b3;

  font-weight: bold;

  text-decoration: underline; }



.articlebody p {

  font-family: "Verdana", Times, serif;

  font-size: 16px;

  color: #000; }



.articlebody ul, .articlebody ol {

  display: block;

  width: 100%; }



.articlebody ul li, .articlebody ol li {

  margin: 15px 50px;

  list-style-position: outside; }



.articlebody div, .articlebody p {

  margin: 10px 0; }


 If anyone has any questions on how to implement this or how to modify it to match the styling you want on your portal, feel free to ask! 


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