WYSIWYG Editor
A rich text editor producing formatted content — bold, lists, links, headings — without the author writing markup.
Where to find it
Architect Panel → Data:
- Datastores — the datastore, then Table Designer to add or edit a field
What it stores
Markup generated from what the author formatted. The stored value is markup even though the author never saw any.
When to use it
- Content that will be displayed formatted — descriptions, articles, letter bodies.
- Anything authored by somebody non-technical who needs more than plain text.
- E-mail and document content where emphasis and structure matter.
Pasting from a word processor
The most common practical problem. Content pasted from a word processor brings its own formatting with it — fonts, sizes, colours, spacing — and the result looks wrong wherever it is displayed, often only on some devices.
Tell authors to paste as plain text and format afterwards. It takes a moment and prevents a class of "why does this look strange" that is genuinely hard to diagnose from the stored value.
It is not a page designer
People will try to control layout with it — tables for positioning, repeated line breaks for spacing, fixed widths. That produces content that looks right in one place and breaks everywhere else, particularly in e-mail and on phones.
Keep it to semantic formatting: emphasis, lists, links, headings. Layout belongs to whatever renders the content.
Where the content is going matters
Content destined for e-mail has different constraints from content shown on a page — e-mail clients support far less. Content that will be printed or turned into a PDF has different constraints again.
Author with the destination in mind, and check it there rather than in the editor.
Markup and safety
Because the stored value is markup, what happens to it when displayed matters. Where content is authored by people you do not fully trust — an external portal, a public submission — that is a question to settle deliberately rather than assume.
Search sees the text, not the formatting
Searching finds the words. It does not find "everything with a heading", and the markup itself is not what people are searching for. That is the right behaviour and worth knowing when a search result looks unexpected.
Worked example
A team uses WYSIWYG for e-mail template bodies. After a run of messages displaying oddly in one client, they find authors had been pasting from a word processor. Guidance to paste as plain text, plus a check in a real client before sending, ends the problem entirely.
Recommendations
- Tell authors to paste as plain text.
- Keep it to semantic formatting, not layout.
- Check content where it will be displayed, not in the editor.
- Use a text area where formatting adds nothing.