2007/12/08

Write Area 0.4, now with preferences dialog

A new version released? But the previous release was just 2 days ago!

Yes, it's soon, but these have been 2 days full of work, understanding the Firefox preferences system in order to create this "nice" dialog available from the Addons Manager: Small preferences

With this dialog you can change some behavior of the editor and its look. In future versions more options might be added (after all FCKeditor has lots of possibilities), but let's review these ones.

Generate <p> on return

This option controls what is generated when you press the enter or return key. If it's checked then you will generate <p> (paragraphs), and pressing Shift+Enter will generate <br> (simple line breaks).

If the option is unchecked then the options are reversed and by default you will use <br> and can use <p> by pressing the Shift+Enter combo.

Show table borders

This one is a aesthetical issue. Trying to work with tables that have no border might be hard sometimes, so if this option is checked then you will see some ghost borders around the table and cells.

Language

By default the editor will try to use your language (that's it: the one of Firefox) for the labels, dialogs, messages. There are a bunch of them (currently one bunch == 39) included. But if you prefer to use another one you just have to disable the autoselection and choose your own one.

Fonts

This option lists the names of fonts that you want to be available under the Font formatting combo in the editor. You can add your own prefered ones or remove the existing. Remember that in the end this is just a request from you, the web author to the browser of your visitor to use certain font. There's no warranty that the visitor will have the same fonts installed on his computer than you have, so don't come here screaming because you have been told that everythings is being displayed with some boring font instead of the fancy one that you have choosed.

Skin

This is the skin for the toolbar and the dialogs, choose the one that you like the most.

Toolbar

There are two options now, both have a predefined set of buttons.

In the future I will try to bring further configuration possibilities with regard to the toolbar.

Other changes

Besides the preferences dialog, this release sets the MaxVersion of the extension as compatible with the Firefox 3 beta, and also fixes two problems reported by Martinkou in the reviews at a.m.o.

Go ahead, follow this link to install Write Area, remember that until the extension has been tested by enough people you will need to register before you are allowed to view it, it's a measure to protect Firefox users from potential dangerous extensions but you can trust me, this one is safe, all the code is just some html and js files. And if you don't trust me (after all I bet that you don't know me), then you can review its contents before installing it.

Thanks to anyone that tests it and write some review about it.

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