I’m looking for an internal representation format for text, which would support basic formatting (font face, size, weight, indentation, basic tables, also supporting the following features:
- Bidirectional input (Hebrew, Arabic, etc.)
- Multi-language input (i.e. UTF-8) in same text field
- Anchored footnotes (i.e. a superscript number that’s a link to that numbered footnote)
I guess TEI or DocBook are rich enough, but here’s the snag — I want these text buffers to be Web-editable, so I need either an edit control that eats TEI or DocBook, or reliable and two-way conversion between one of them and whatever the edit control can eat.
UPDATE: The edit control I’m thinking of is something like TinyMCE, but AFAICT, TinyMCE lacks footnotes, and I’m not sure about its scalability (how about editing 1 or 2 megabytes of text?)
Any pointers much appreciated!
FCKeditor has a great API, supports several programming languages (considering it is javascript this isn’t hard to achieve), can be loaded through HTML or instantiated in code; but most of all, allows easy access to the underlying form field, so having a jQuery or prototype ajax buffer shouldn’t be terribly difficult to achieve.
The load time is very quick compared to previous versions. I’d give it a whirl.