How to apply text style in a more useful way

Hi there,

when applying a text style (e.g. a text color) to some marked markup, CK Editor generates a <span> tag around that markup and adds a corresponding style attribute. Now, when that markup contains anchor tags, the style of the span tag does not modify the visualization of what's in those anchor tags. I noticed that when highlighting a section of text that crosses paragraphs, CK Editor cleanly puts span tags within those tags thereby preserving correct HTML. The same would be useful for anchor tags.

Is there a way to turn that behavior on? Is there a reason why that wouldn't make sense?

Thanks
Henning

Fri, 10/23/2009 - 15:14

fruitbatinshades

Joined: 25/06/2008

Posts: 40

Re: How to apply text style in a more useful way

This isn't exactly what you're after but you can alter the rendering code. I needed to stop the style tag being written out so I changed it render out a class with the font name.
config.js

//override font style to write out class attribute rather than span style wrapper
   config.font_style =
    {
       element: 'span',
       attributes: { 'class': '#(family)' },
       overrides: [{ element: 'font', attributes: { 'face': null}}]
    };

Might point you in a useful direction

Fri, 10/23/2009 - 16:07

gnomie

Joined: 18/09/2009

Posts: 6

Re: How to apply text style in a more useful way

It seems to be a slightly different problem, but it helped as it made me browse through the corresponding code and I think I found the important definitions in dtd.js. In there it is defined that a span is not a valid child element of an anchor. As far as I was able to look it up that is not required by the standard. I.e. a span is a valid child of an anchor.

So it would be neat, if span could simply be added to the list of valid child elements of an anchor - which would perfectly solve my problem. I will give it a try.

I would be interested if there is a reason to exclude span or if that is just an oversight?

Is this actually the right place to post suggestions for code changes?

Thanks!
Henning

Sun, 10/25/2009 - 10:27

gnomie

Joined: 18/09/2009

Posts: 6

Re: How to apply text style in a more useful way

So here's what I did and what worked for me:

In core/dtd.js, in the function body returning CKEDITOR.dtd, there is an object property for every tag:

   
        //...    
        b : L,
        a : J,
        blockquote : P,
        // ...

The capital letter object L,K,M,... are groups of tags. I changed the snippet above to:

   
        //...    
        b : L,
        a : X({span:1},J),
        blockquote : P,
        // ...

(Note the change of property "a".)
I am sure it would be smarter to update the groups of tags correspondingly but I was not certain of the side effects. Anyway: This works in terms of applying styles even across anchor tags and so far I was not able to detect any negative side effect. Hence it would be nice to have this (or something equivalent) in the next CKEditor version.

Thanks,
Henning