Joomla Text Formating

Recently, one of our clients wrote me about issues he was having with my favorite Joomla Content Editor:

"I have to tell you – I am VERY unhappy about how Joomla deals with text being pasted into it from text or word – I have been playing with this interface since I started using it to try and figure out why I have such MAJOR formatting issues with text. Again, I have just wasted 1 hour of my time getting this very poor text editor to recognize my spacing. I have allowed this to go on since I started, but today is the final battle I will play with this terrible formatting tool – I really need you to tell me how I can better control or get Joomla to maintain my pasted text spacing."

Here is the advice that I provided which later worked for the client above and I thought other Joomla business users may find it useful as well:

Never copy and paste text into the editor from Word, other website, etc and expect it to work correctly. When you do so, many invisible and non-standard html elements invisible to human eye get embedded in the page and from here you'll fail miserably to format anything in any Joomla editor.

• If you need to copy something from Word, other website, etc, paste this information first into Notepad (in windows os) or some other plain text editor. This will clear any hidden formatting and special tags. Then paste text into Joomla Editor text area and use Joomla Editor Tools to format the text (to make it bold, colored, etc).

You may be trying to get down to the next row by hitting enter key and you end up creating another paragraph with an extra white line.

• You may avoid doublespacing by holding down the SHIFT key when hitting ENTER. This will not take you to the next paragraph, instead you'll be able to start typing in the next row.

There are huge issues on websites in page loading time resulting from images not being resized correctly. Instead of image being the same size as it appears on the website, they are scaled and and appear much smaller than they really are. Why is this a problem? This is very inefficient causing you lost time as pages load slower but it's much worse for first time visitors to the site as they do not have those images stored in the browser's cache.

• Size the images correctly during upload or click on it in the JCE Image Manager, then use icons on the right to perform image manipulation/resizing.