Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Editing/Add indentation and alignment features to visual editor

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Random proposal ►◄ Editing  The survey has concluded. Here are the results!

Add indentation and alignment features to visual editor

  • Problem: Currently controlling indentations and alignment is difficult since such edits can only be done in source mode by those with advanced HTML coding knowledge, and it is not available in Visual Editor.
  • Who would benefit: All editors
  • Proposed solution: Add alignment options (left, right, center, justified etc.) for text and multimedia items in the editor itself instead of through codes and template fields in the Visual Editor and enable the press "tab" indent feature.
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: WikiAviator (talk) 06:12, 17 November 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Discussion

  • What are specific changes you would like to see? --Izno (talk) 04:40, 18 November 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
    Things like adjusting paragraphing syles, left-right indents, colour changes, spellchecks etc. WikiAviator (talk) 06:33, 18 November 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
    I can see how these features could be useful. I am just going to pick on the colour changes feature, which seems a bit too advanced for new users using VisualEditor, and may cause inappropriate use/abuse. If more advanced formatting and colour features are eventually added, I hope they would be opt-in instead of opt-out. H78c67c (talk) 05:20, 19 November 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
    I wouldn't call these features too advanced for new users (who hasn't used a word processor before?), and regarding the point of inappropriate use, we can add a warning chatbox when a user attempts to change the text colour or font to prevent inappropriate use and we don't often see this feature abuse problem with text size do we? Furthermore, for not-so-tech-savvy users like me who have problems with HTML formatting, it is really difficult when it comes to changing colours and fonts in Wikipedia, or resizing non-text elements (that's why my username is plain to this date), therefore this would be highly beneficial and we don't need this to be opt-in. WikiAviator (talk) 08:55, 19 November 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • @WikiAviator: I'm afraid this proposal as written is too broad. We can't rewrite VisualEditor to work the same as popular word processors. It's much more complicated than that. Could you revise this to focus on specific features? Color changing is a good example (I assume you mean changing the color of text). Thanks, MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 23:07, 19 November 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
    Actually changing the color of text/tables is proposed at Allow text and table colour to be featured on the visual editor to change, so if you could, find a different feature to be the focus of this proposal. Alignment or indentation I think is okay. Much appreciated, MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 23:27, 19 November 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
    I've edited the proposal, thanks for your suggestion :) WikiAviator (talk) 00:53, 20 November 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • I don't understand what options you want. VisualEditor is not a word processor, and we shouldn't be making it into one. — Omegatron (talk) 15:27, 20 December 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Voting

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