MT Authoring Options: HTML, WYSIWYG, Text Formatting
One of the reasons I (re)started my blogging here is that I do a fair bit of writing and knowledge sharing on MT, but its scattered through out frustrated users comments, mailing lists and even private inboxes. This is one of those instances I’m capturing for others.
Jack Carlson over on Radical Aethist writes:
Sadly, MT does not have an option to post in HTML. It’s interface is all WYSIWYG.
This isn’t true of MT. In fact, until MT4 was released, it was essentially the opposite.
The version Radical Aethist has listed in the sidebar is 3.32 which never had a WYSIWYG option much to the chagrin of many users. Since MT 2.5 (I believe) you could use any of a number of text formatting plugins or simply select “None.” By default, MT 3 uses the simple and albeit crude built-in “Converts Line Breaks” formatter.
I asked Jack to check if his new/edit entry screen has a “Text Formatting” pulldown. Since it’s not displayed by default, many users miss that it exists unless they read the manual — and they never do. What you have to do is click the “Customize the display of this page” link at the bottom of the page and check the Text Formatting option. Once your preference have been saved you can switch from the default to “None” that will allow for HTML to be used to format the entry.
That is for MT3. MT4 is a bit different though. The default option is Rich Text which is WYSIWYG. The WYSIWYG toolbar is always present which I found a bit disconcerting. You can select “None” from the Format pulldown just above the toolbar (or any other Text Formatting plugin — MT4 also includes Markdown and Textile plugins) and enter HTML. You can also use Rich Text and switch to source view and edit the markup directly.
Admittedly the WYSIWYG editor isn’t so hot if you are very particular about your HTML. What it produces is rather ugly HTML — then again what WYSIWYG editor does produce beautiful semantically correct standards based markup? (I’ve never come across one.) I’ve cleaned up entries using the source view (HTML mode), only to have to revert back when I made one edit in WYSIWYG mode.
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