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guideCKEditor 5 features overview

CKEditor 5 has many features, and the number is constantly growing. You can find the most recent list of features on the left. In addition to working on new features, we also expand and improve the existing ones. Newly added or meaningfully updated feature guides are marked with a NEW icon. Premium features, which require an additional license to work, have a Premium feature icon.

Use the main menu button in the upper-left corner to navigate through the documentation.

# Using CKEditor 5 features

Most of the editor features are accessible from a highly configurable toolbar (in fact, there are two of those) offering buttons and dropdowns. Some features also have a dedicated contextual toolbar. You can also execute plenty of actions with keyboard shortcuts. CKEditor 5 offers a dedicated accessibility help dialog that displays a list of all available keyboard shortcuts in a dialog. It can be opened by pressing Alt + 0 (on Windows) or Option + 0 (on macOS) or via toolbar. The entire user interface comes with a multitude of translations and it supports Right-to-Left (RTL) languages.

# CKEditor 5 WYSIWYG editor features and functions

CKEditor 5 features cover several functional areas. Listed below are some of the most useful ones.

# Formatting features

Basic text styles include essentials like bold Bold, italics Italic, superscript Superscript, and subscript Subscript as well as inline code formatting and more.

The font feature provides support for using different font families Font Family, controlling the font size Font Size as well as font Font Color and background colors Background Colors.

Headings Heading 1 (with configurable levels and styles) and the text alignment feature Align Left help organize the structure of the document.

You can apply most of these formatting options from the toolbar or on the go, as you type, thanks to the autoformatting feature that employs Markdown syntax. You can remove them with the remove format feature Remove Format.

CKEditor 5 formatting features.

# Advanced content editing

Rich text would not be rich without images. You can upload, caption, edit, or style them. You can even paste them straight from the URL with the help of the image feature Image and create a responsive design. If that is not enough, embed media Media into your content.

Links Link are an essential feature for online content. You can paste, change, or attribute them.

Provide clear and accessible data using tables Table (you can even nest them to create advanced layouts), ordered Numbered List and unordered lists Bulleted List with various markers to choose from, and to-do lists To-do List. Use indents and outdents Indent and block quotes Quote to structure the content and draw the reader’s attention to it.

Enrich your content further by embedding HTML code HTML – this one is useful for webmasters. If you need to present code instead of employing it, use the code block Code Block that lets you produce code listing with a syntax highlight, too!

CKEditor 5 image feature.

# Collaboration

We created the CKEditor 5 Framework with collaboration in mind.

All collaboration features manage user data and permissions with the users API. Track changes Track changes allows the users to follow any changes made to the edited document both asynchronously and in real time. The users accept or reject these changes with a single click from a convenient side panel.

Where tracking changes is not enough, the comments Comments come in, offering a perfect collaborative communication platform for writing and editing as a team. When you resolve a discussion, it moves to the comments archive.

Additionally, CKEditor 5 offers the restricted editing mode Enable editing where just the selected parts of the content may be edited by some users, based on a permissions system. And when there is a need for even more control, there are the read-only and comments-only modes that let the user access the content, but not edit it.

CKEditor 5 collaboration features.

You can also track the progress and changes done in the content with the revision history feature Revision history. This robust document versioning tool lets you create named versions, compare changes, and restore previous document versions. It tracks all progress – also when many editors work together.

CKEditor 5 document versioning feature.

# Document conversion

If you need to share the document outside your team, use the export to PDF feature Export to PDF to produce industry-standard, portable, cross-platform files.

If you need to work further on the document, choose the export to Word feature Export to Word instead – and keep your comments and changes in the resulting document, ready to edit further.

The pagination feature Previous pageNext page complements the exports to ensure all produced documents will always look the way they should.

If you have any documents in the DOCX format, you can convert them into HTML with the import from Word feature and then continue editing in CKEditor 5.

# HTML and Markdown output

The CKEditor 5 WYSIWYG editor by default produces HTML output that you can save into a database. The default output can be also switched to GitHub-flavored Markdown formatted text.

CKEditor 5 output features.

# Productivity pack

The productivity pack is a set of exclusive premium features available to holders of a CKEditor 5 commercial license.

The productivity pack provides tools that make the creation of content faster and more efficient, thanks to providing predefined templates and a new set of slash commands.

Document outline and table of contents make navigating large documents much easier.

Format painter lets the users style their content in a blaze while the case change feature Case change lets them apply the title case to selected sentences or turn whole paragraphs into uppercase.

Productivity pack also includes the enhanced paste from Office plugin with far greater formatting support.

# Other productivity features

The AI Assistant AI Assistant will help you rewrite, edit, or translate the existing content to match your needs, or even come up with a completely new one!

The word and character counter will help you track progress and control the volume of the content.

Use Markdown syntax to format content on the go to speed up the editing process. Thanks to automatic text transformations (also known as autocorrect) and the spell checker Spell and grammar check you can ensure everything is correct. Create multi-language documents and correct them on the go with automatic language detection and text part language feature.

Keep full control of your work. Be safe and never lose anything thanks to the autosave plugin.

CKEditor 5 AI Assistant feature.

# Customizable user experience

Work as you like it – choose a user interface approach from several predefined builds, add features to your build or remove them with the online builder, or use the DLL builds. Then tailor the user interface to your needs with a customizable editor toolbar, arranging feature buttons, dropdowns, and other items in whatever way you need.

CKEditor 5 customizable UI.

# Cross-platform interoperability

Do not get stopped by technology differences – CKEditor 5 offers cross-platform interoperability. As a web-based JavaScript framework it works in all environments. What is more, you can use documents from other tools: paste content from Microsoft Office or from from Google Docs and preserve all formatting.

The editor supports pasting plain text and Markdown-formatted content to inherit the original document structure.

CKEditor 5 paste features.

# Backward feature compatibility

If you want to migrate from CKEditor 4 to CKEditor 5, check the migration guide.

# Feature availability

Predefined CKEditor 5 builds have plenty of these features available out-of-the-box, like autoformatting or keyboard support.

However, you need to include some presented features manually in your CKEditor 5 build, for example, the Markdown processor which outputs Markdown instead of HTML. You can add these plugins to a custom build with the CKEditor 5 online builder.

You can refer to the full list of features available in each build for details.

We also offer the flexibility of the DLL builds. They enable the addition of new plugins into an existing build without the need to rebuild the installation.

# Feature examples

We present each rich-text editor feature on a separate page. It includes one or more working demos showcasing a feature along with some customization ideas that you can use in your implementation.

In most feature demos the number of features enabled is limited to make the exposed piece of functionality stand out more, as shown in the screenshots above. But in your CKEditor 5 WYSIWYG editor implementation you are free to choose and combine any features you like from those available. You can achieve this by using the CKEditor 5 online builder.

# Why does the editor filter out content (styles, classes, elements)

CKEditor 5 implements a custom data model. This means that the editor needs to convert every piece of loaded content to that model and then render it back to the view.

Each kind of content must be handled by some feature. For example, the ckeditor5-basic-styles package handles HTML elements such as <b>, <i>, <u>, etc. along with their representation in the model. The feature defines the two–way conversion between the HTML (view) and the editor model.

If you load some content unknown to any editor feature, the editor will drop it. If you want the editor to handle all the HTML5 elements, you need to write plugins to support them or use the General HTML Support (GHS) feature. Once you do that, CKEditor 5 will not filter anything out.

# Looking for more

The examples mentioned here do not present all features included in CKEditor 5, nor does the list on the left panel. For example, some end-user features like undo and redo are quite self-explanatory. They are mentioned, for example, in the keyboard shortcuts guide.

CKEditor 5 is in active development and we add new features to it all the time. We also work on expanding and improving the existing ones. If you are missing anything in particular, feel free to suggest a new feature and share your feedback with us. If it has already been reported by someone else, upvote it 👍  to show your support.

# Creating custom features

Probably the most exciting features are the ones you can develop on top of CKEditor 5 Framework!

We are gradually enhancing the CKEditor 5 Framework documentation together with the API documentation, hoping to give you a solid base for creating custom features.

The official add-ons repository for CKEditor 4 reached an impressive number of over 300 add-ons created and published by the community. Now it is time for you to add your contributions to CKEditor 5!