adding MS Word capabilities

Don’t paste content from Microsoft Word into WordPress as the pasted text will also contain Word’s own formatting. Sooner or later, this formatting will stop your pages from being displayed correctly (if at all) in Internet Explorer. If you cannot possibly manage without Word, paste your text into NotePad (or another text editor) first, then copy from NotePad into WordPress. Or use Windows LiveWriter or another local blogging tool

Hello again (so soon),

Right. This is your standard disclaimer, everything of which I am already aware (I opened the HTML file in notepad++ and copy/pasted from there, but thanks for the concern). Nevertheless, I like the extra fonts and styles that I use in Word to be available in WordPress and they’re there with – at least in this sample – full IE AND Firefox compatibility (See link in previous post for a sample).

What I am ASKING IS: is there a way to incorporate these fonts and styles into the WordPress editor by adding (only the necessary) HTML code to a system css or HTML config file? I couldn’t figure it out with my own level of expertise.

Try looking for an advanced editor plugin.

Adding fonts is going to be prolemtatic for you. The fonts will only dipslya on other users computers if they have that font intalled. If they don’t it will revert back to some other default font, and look different from what you expect it to. It will display fine on your comptuer because you have the fonts installed, but you can’t contorl what others have.

There’s things you can do to get around this, like using Cufon or web fonts, but then it’s extra overhead for your site. Exactly how many fonts are you trying to use? Most good sites would use two or three fonts. I’d never want to see more then 4 used on a site ever, and that means the complete site, not just a single page. Changing fonts all over the place gets very confusing for users.

What you should do is look into learning more about CSS and how it can relate to your sits content. When you get a better understanding of how to use CSS effectively you’ll see that it’s a whole lot easier then trying to use Word to format stuff, and will end up with your pages HTML code being a huge amound smaller. this lets your site be less complex so it’s eaiser to edit later on, but also makes the loading times a lot shorter, which is a lot better for your visitors.

Well, I’m not really concerned about font style so much as font size and the various layout things that Word does like borders and shading. In my sample I had a glossary and lots of quoted text that I think is a lot easier to read if it’s delineated in smaller font size and/or different colors. Subtle change in font style is good too, but I agree that only several types of fonts are required. Tremendous variations are available in just one font style, like Arial and Times New Roman. I use several common font styles (mostly Times New Roman and Arial variations) to avoid the problem you mention.

You hit upon my exact question: I think it would be easy to have some of those features made available from a CSS file, I just don’t know enough to configure it myself. I am trying to find out where is the configuration file that controls the options in the WordPress editor, like the drop down that selects font styles. Do you know, or know someone who knows? Thanks in advance.

OK, that’s not as bad as I thought. Things like borders are going to be alittle bit different, and shading can be hard with HTML-based text. But there are waya roudn it with the right amount of work.

It is possible to set up a CSS stylesheet that works inside your editor area and shows you what the text will really look like on the finished page. I’ve found a very good write-up about it from a guy that’s done a whole lot in WordPress, so if anyone knows it, it’ll be him!

https://yoast.com/wordpress-editor-style/

Thank you catacauastic, looks like you’ve hooked me up with the right people! I’m not sure if this is what I’m looking for, but these folks’ll probably know more than anyone. I appreciate it!

Hi Catacaustic,

Apparently in WordPress 3.5.1 this feature is already enabled (I just checked mine), but this css file is where all the options in the tiny editor are defined and would have something to do with the features I’m looking for. Thanks again!

Adding an editor-style.css file is not going to make that same CSS automatically available on the front end of the site. Nor will it embed any additional fonts into your site.

Right. It just controls the WYSIWYG capabilities of the editor. I think you have to sink it up with the site.css file, which means I can extract what I need from the Word generated HTML file to add features. Hopefully, I can find someone else who’s already done something similar to point me in the right direction. Thanks for replying!