Quill – Your powerful, rich text editor

[Óvári]

Would replacing the Editor component of Thunderbird with the modular "Quill Rich Text Editor" be worthwhile?

Quill – Your powerful, rich text editor
Quill is a free, open source WYSIWYG editor built for the modern web. With its modular architecture and expressive API, it is completely customizable to fit any need.
http://quilljs.com/
There are 3 examples showing different "Composition Toolbars"; none in the first, limited in the the second; and, full in the last.

Quill GitHub
https://github.com/quilljs/quill/
License: BSD 3-clause

Repositories
https://github.com/quilljs/

Thank you

[Bron Gondwana]

Of course there's also Squire which I've offered before, we wrote it specifically for rich text email:

https://github.com/neilj/Squire

MIT license.

We don't have quite as slick a landing page though.

_______________________________________________

tb-planning mailing list

tb-pl...@mozilla.org

https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/tb-planning

--

  Bron Gondwana

  br...@fastmail.fm

[Axel Grude]

I just had a deeper read into the documentation of quill, especially 

https://quilljs.com/docs/formats/

And the restriction to a small well known number of them

"By default all formats are enabled and allowed to exist within a Quill editor and can be configured with the formats option. "

is what worries me in a way that such modern HTML editors always seem to restrict editing to a very reduced number of HTML4 tags (prominently featuring inline elements such as font) so they very much appear to restrict formatting like most web editors (and their feature set sends to be already provided by our current composer).

If we go through the trouble of replacing the editor I think it ought to be more powerful and directed towards building reusable style sheet templates for formatting similar to a word ".dot" template file. It should support extendable / user definable inline and block styles and not just be restricted to "vanilla" p, h1, h2 elements, ideally offering some HTML5 elements that could be added to the toolbar and styled (initially with a css class editor; later on we should build a UI for adding / modifying / extending class formats). It shold allow a dedicated toolbar (or toolbar element) for adding / presenting such styles similar to the rich text editors such as word to allow access to the full HTML layout feature set. 

For example I may want to define a span style that I am using to highlight keywords with a gradient background,  border radius, box-shadow and non-breaking white space, and then want to create red and blue flavours of this.  Then add them as style buttons to the styles toolbar. 

That would truly leverage the layout power of HTML4 + Css3 within the confines of email composition ; and I am not sure whether the  "lite Html" editors that are usually suggested in Tb Planning are a good starting point;  all they seem to do is offer the same restricted feature set with a very narrow predefined number of formats. 

In my mind this unnecessarily  restricts what Thunderbird can do with its gecko based HTML engine; and the restriction is one of the reasons why outlook (which basically has a MS word component built in for style editing) is so much preferred in the commercial email world (of course Exchange server being another important reason).

How can we allow the new editor to be more extendable with custom formats and encourage more css class based editing (ideally deprecating the use of <font>)? I feel most of the editors I have seen so far seem to be stuck in that font paradigm, which involves a lot of manual copying and pasting of html segments if you want to achieve mire sophisticated consistent layout. 

Which ultimately seems to be discouraging use of more evolved layout, and isn't what I would call superior to the current "lite html" composers. Would it not be better to extend the existing editor with style sheet templates  or find a new editor that already supports such functionality? I feel a new editor should be more focused on the platform (HTML5, CSS3) rather than a same old restricted GUI and minimal old feature set. That's why we need more alternative suggestions if you guys know any. 

Regards,

  Axel

[Matt Harris]

On 30-Dec-16 5:57 PM, Axel Grude wrote:

I just had a deeper read into the documentation of quill, especially 

https://quilljs.com/docs/formats/

And the restriction to a small well known number of them

"By default all formats are enabled and allowed to exist within a Quill editor and can be configured with the formats option. "

is what worries me in a way that such modern HTML editors always seem to restrict editing to a very reduced number of HTML4 tags (prominently featuring inline elements such as font) so they very much appear to restrict formatting like most web editors (and their feature set sends to be already provided by our current composer).

If we go through the trouble of replacing the editor I think it ought to be more powerful and directed towards building reusable style sheet templates for formatting similar to a word ".dot" template file.

Agreed,  but our methods of composing with a template need a huge overhaul to make this useful to the average user, including the use of placeholders for address book fields.  One of the things that hold folk back is we do not do write a new email with Christmas stationary for example.  You have to hunt up the description in a list.  This is a picture and preview based world now.

Matt