WYSIWYG Comments Feature

Skeptical Science has modernized the comments system (with many thanks to Paul D), by adding a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) comment facility.  Now, no one should feel tempted to violate the comments policy by using all-caps... because you can easily bold and italicize and do other things (within reason).

For most people, use should be straightforward.  The main things that you can do are obvious, and are like any computer editor you've encountered elsewhere.

There are some cool features, though...

The Basics

The Basic tab, the one you start with, has the most obvious and useful tools:

• A button to bold selected text.
• A button to italicize selected text.
• A button to underline selected text.
• A button to strikethrough selected text.
• A button to subscript selected text like _this.
• A button to superscript selected text like ^this.
• A button to create bulleted lists (like this one).
• A button to create numbered lists.
• Buttons to indent and outdent paragraphs.
• A button to quote text
  [Please use this, but sparingly, when quoting a portion of another user's comments.]

Insert

Under the insert tab you can add images, links, tables, and special characters such as Δ and €.  This feature, combined with superscripts and subscripts, is particularly useful in forming equations — such as the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, J_e=σT⁴, or a one-box climate model such as c[∂T/∂t] = -λT + F(t).  Subscripts are also useful in molecular formulas (such as CO₂).

To add a link, select the text you want linked, click the link button, and enter the URL.  To break a link, click anywhere in the linked text, and click the un-link button to remove the link (or click the link button to change the URL).

You can insert a table by clicking the table icon and entering the table size, or by clicking on the disclosure triangle and draggining to select your table size.

[It's up to the bold to figure out the other aspects of managing tables.]

Images

Inserting images requires some special attention.  When you click the image button, a dialog will come up.

Enter the URL of the image you wish to embed, and then please click on the Appearance tab.  This will show a dialog where you can check the width of the image.  If the image is wider than 450 pixels, please enter 450 so that the image will shrink to fit well into the comments columns.

Click "Insert" and you're done.

Source

The bold and knowledgable can still tweak their comments by directly editing the HTML, using the Source tab.  Again... if you want to do that, then you certainly don't need help here.  And if you don't know what any of that means, you'd be best off leaving the Source tab alone.  WYSIWYG was invented so that you don't need a Source tab.

Undo and Redo

There are undo and redo buttons (the blue swirly arrows to the left of the tabs).

Keyboard Shortcuts

Your common keyboard shortcuts for bold and italics, among other things, should work, too.

Preview

There is no preview.  You don't need one anymore.  What you see is what you get.

Happy Hunting Commenting!

Posted by Bob Lacatena on Sunday, 3 February, 2013

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