Hello everyone, I'm looking for a very specific kind of program. I want a minimalistic WYSIWYG html editor. Preferably a small, fast executable that correctly renders and writes a very small subset of html - no dynamic or interactive pages. Specifically, I only need it to support these tags:

<p></p><br><OL></OL><LI></LI><b></b><u></u><i></i><FONT></FONT><img><UL></UL><TABLE></TABLE><TR></TR> <TD></TD><del><del><div></div>

In fact, if it doesn't support any other tags, then that's even better! Google searches keep turning up NVu and Quanta, but I really want something much smaller.

I understand such a program may not exist, and I may be forced to write it. Can any more experienced developer tell me how difficult it would be to write such a minimalistic editor, if I based it on dillo, for example?

Thanks!

Don't have any reason to believe it's any more minimalistic than the ones you've seen, but SeaMonkey (or IceApe if it's Debian) includes a WISIWYG HTML editor.

Assuming I wind up having to write this, would it be easier to build one up from a browser like dillo, or strip one down from something like the SeaMonkey one?

Okay, so I'm going to show my youth a bit here. I know that Netscape became Mozilla, and Mozilla creates opensource browswers, but was Netscape itself open-source? Since I'm basically using very old html, I could just use a very old WYSIWYG editor. I'll google this too.

Searching the Etch repo for "wysiwyg" turned up this:

tinymce - platform independent web based Javascript/HTML WYSIWYG editor

Ideally, I'm looking for something even more basic than that, as I want to somehow convince it to only output the above listed tags. I suppose I should start looking at old programs, but thanks so much for your help. TinyMce could be a starting point to stip down from.

In my experinece, dillo doesn't support fonts very well. I suggest looking on sourceforge or freshmeat to find what your looking for. By the way, does size of the program matter, or is "old html", the only criteria? If so, you might want to go with Mozilla.

Well, the size of the program matters very much. I am hoping to make a contribution to the OLPC project by coming up with a new document format. I noticed that reading e-books would involve pdf's, which are enormous when you consider that the things have only a miniscule bit of disk space. So, anyways, I'm writing a document format from scratch and optimizing it for size. The format itself is all binary, but I'm trying to use simplistic html as an intermediate file format to save me the trouble of writing something to render this new format - just leverage all the pre-existing browsers instead.

My trouble is, my format is all but useless until I can provide a way to create them that doesn't involve sitting down with the specs and a hex editor - hence html.

Note: I'm also doing this as a learning experience and this is in pre-pre-alpha development (aka, I haven't done much coding). OLPC doesn't know I'm working on it, or that I exist. I was going to submit it once I have a resonably working format.

If you want minimalist, why not use a NON-wysiwyg editor? I really like Bluefish---I am very much in control and cut and try layout goes quite fast once you are used to it.
Most wysiwygs are not targeted to minimalists.

I would go non-WYSIWYG if myself or people like me were the intended audience, but I would like to eventually develop it to a point where the editor would be useful for teachers to create e-documents for their students. Not to mention, the html intermediate format is not necessarily permanent. It may be, if it's decided that such is the best way, but html is only my temporary solution to save myself from having to write a rendering engine for this new format. (Until later). After all, the format is more intended as a minimalist pdf replacement than an html replacement.

I guess the best way to say it is that I'm (at least temporarily) trying to use a minorly hacked subset of html as an interface to this format - it's not the format itself.

Or even something like pico or nano.

It doesn't appear that such a WYSIWYG editor exists, not many people really want to blend WYSIWYG with minimalist, since WYSIWYG is sort of inherently non-minimalist. I'm looking into the Scribus file format, hoping to find it XML-based, so that I can us it as an intermediate format. Scribus is also too big for those computers, so I guess I'll be stuck writing a rendering engine after all.

Are you talking about some book or books in specific? Otherwise, I tend to disagree with this statement. If you remove the "images/jpegs/pictures" out of the pdf books, they can be quite small. I have SEVERAL pdf books stored on my pda, and I view them with xpdf.

I didn't mean that pdf's were large, I meant that they were large *considering the OLPC hard drive size*. I went into openoffice, typed a one-page document, and exported to pdf (and saved in a variety of other formats for comparison. Then I hand-entered it into my format (well, a prototype of it). The pdf was 42k, an odt was 15k, and mine was 1.5k. Now, I'm not claiming to have found a way to compress pdf by that much - a acheived the decrease in size by using a severly limited feature set. However, when your hard drive is that small, smaller is better for documents.

Have you considered LaTeX? It's hardly more verbose than
HTML, and there's tools to produce PS and PDF output if
eye-candy is what you're after in the end. And it doesn't
take long to learn, even for non-techie people.


Cheers,
Tink