Tech Forum

There needs to be more formatting control. Specifically, the ability to insert a line break without creating a new paragraph. As it is, it is impossible to include a properly formatted address withing an article.

rpyne wrote:Specifically, the ability to insert a line break without creating a new paragraph. As it is, it is impossible to include a properly formatted address withing an article.

Use Shift+Enter to insert a simple line break.

aebrown wrote:Use Shift+Enter to insert a simple line break.

That works fine until you save the article at which time it runs the lines together.

rpyne wrote:That works fine until you save the article at which time it runs the lines together.

Oops. You're right. Sorry about that -- I should have saved.

In any case, I do agree that the formatting is very weak. The image positioning options are quite limited, there's no indenting, no font control, etc. It appears that the Newsletter uses the CKEditor, which has many more features than the Newsletter editor exposes. It seems like it shouldn't be hard to configure it to allow more formatting options.

I've been using the Newsletter tool pretty regularly and while the basic formatting the Newsletter provides is adequate, it really could use a few more formatting options.

I, too, would like a line break without creating a new paragraph. I'd also like to choose the font color and at least have one larger size for headlines and titles.

I haven't dealt with positioning graphics, so I don't have an opinion on that, probably because most of that need is met by attaching documents formatted elsewhere as PDFs to the Newsletter articles.

One thing I do frequently is paste the contents of emails (sent by ward organizations to their membership) into the Newsletter. It's sad that I can paste in rich text and much of it looks like it's going to work, but when you hit Save, all that goes away (except for Bold and Italic). Even line breaks that were pasted in usually run together (as mentioned above). It takes me a lot longer to post these to the Newsletter because I have to reformat everything to look good in the limited formatting that's available.

Is there still no way to do simple formatting such as line breaks in the Newsletter section of LDS.org? Please help! This is desperately needed. Thank you.

On the occasion when I want more formatting in my articles such as larger or different fonts, etc., I produce the document elsewhere where I can format it, then do a screen shot or capture and insert it as a jpg. I doubt that many who read it know it is actually a photo of an article. I also post jpgs of posters announcing coming events and I take a photo of the announcement page from our Sacrament mtg bulletin and post that each week... This may not work for everyone, but it works for me!

Some people with disabilities need the actual text so that screen reading software can access it. A JPEG or PNG probably isn't going to work (although I've seen tools that do OCR on images; I'm not sure of the state of software for people with disabilities).

I recommend that you be aware of your audience and provide accommodations for them if needed. You can always include text below the image. If you have people with disabilities in your unit, check with them to make sure they can read what you're putting there.

After 3 years since rypne started this discussion, what are the odds that there's going to be any new formatting capabilities?

My stake has been regularly updating a pdf for the high councillors and re-attaching it to the only post they've ever made because there's no way to display tabular data in the newsletter.

shem.simmons wrote:After 3 years since rypne started this discussion, what are the odds that there's going to be any new formatting capabilities?

From what I understand, the newsletter is on the low end of development priorities. I suspect the development of the missionary systems and LCR is taking the bulk of the development bandwidth.