Using the WYSIWYG editor

In certain tools, you can control the graphical appearance of your text using the WYSIWYG editor. The WYSIWYG toolbar has icons for editing and styling your text.

Note: Pasting text from Microsoft Word directly into the WYSIWYG editor may result in garbled output, even if the text appears correct in the editor. Instead, to insert formatted text from a Word document, click the Paste from Word icon, place your cursor in the subsequent "Paste from Word" text box, and then press Ctrl-v in Windows, or Cmd-v on a Macintosh, to paste your copied text. Using Ctrl-v (or Cmd-v) to paste is the best method for preserving the formatting of the original Word document. Click OK to add the text to the item you are composing.

The WYSIWYG editor is based on an open-source application called FCKeditor. To see what each icon in the toolbar does, refer to the Toolbar page in the FCKeditor Users Guide.

Browser considerations

To ensure that the WYSIWYG editor appears and functions properly, use a supported browser; see Which browser should I use?

However, Internet Explorer is currently the only browser that supports the paste function within the editor. If you're using Firefox, see Problems pasting text into FCKeditor in Firefox.

Also, Internet Explorer is currently the only browser that supports the spellcheck feature. To use spellcheck, you must first download and install the ieSpell extension from the ieSpell download page; you may only download ieSpell on a personal computer, not on a university-owned workstation.