There has been some discussion of alignment and captioning of images. Just thought I'd offer some suggestions (which not every one may agreee with) but which might be useful.
Image Alignment with a stylesheet greatly simplifies the editor's job over alignment with inline styles. To align an image, the 'Positioning' dropdown adds a single css class as: left, float-left, right, float-right or center. The downside is that it's not entirely standalone code, without the external css it won't work. But, the advantage is very simple and robust css in the editor.
Captions - After numerous experiments with div, table or span outer containers, I decided that captioning images (text in a box below or above which matches the image's width and position) in the editor itself just poses too many headaches. No matter what you do, the end-user can always find a way to disrupt the container. Instead, a caption or caption-top class is added to the image, and the caption put into the Alt field. At page rendering time a php script detects this class and adds the required container tags. Thus the problematic container is never seen in page editing mode, just the class which flags its addition.
Presently I have a proof of concept running and it looks promising. One issue is that the toolbar text-alignment buttons are not compatible, but that could probably be solved quite easily.
If there is any interest in this, I'll post some code.
That's a cool suggestion but
That's a cool suggestion but it likely won't ever happen. CKEditor is now focusing on the new Enhanced Image widget that lets you align and add captions. You can see it here... The old Image plugin will still get the occasional update, but eventually Enhanced Image will become the default plugin.
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Looks pretty good
The Image 2 plugin is developing quite nicely, however I would make a couple of observations:
Using a div or figure as a container for a floated image causes a discontinuity in the surrounding paragraph. This is because block tags are not allowed inside of paras. I guess this doesn't matter too much if you place your insertion point at para topleft, but it does if you want to have inline images partway through a para.
There is also a minor issue in that captions which happen to be longer than the image will 'bust-out' of a div or figure container instead of wrapping gracefully.
My resolution is to use a set of span containers with table display mode set. Since spans are one of the few elements allowed in paras this solves the blank line issue, and tables will wrap long text gracefully. There are other workarounds but after much experimentation this one seems the most effective.