A few months ago, we released our brand new, modern Visual Editor! Since then, we’ve been hard at work to continue to improve the text editor experience for everyone. Today, we have the latest instalment of improvements: the ability to switch your text editor on an article by article level!
Switching your default text editor on a WORLD level
As before, you can switch your world’s default article editor via World Configuration. When you do this, all new articles you create in your world will use that default editor.
What’s changed is that, when you switch editor, it WON’T switch your previous articles to the new editor automatically. The reason for this is simple. Articles previously written with complicated (or incorrect/unorthodox) BBCode don’t change well to the Visual Editor, so we don’t want to force all your old articles to a different editor!
However, we’ve now added the ability for you to do this yourself, manually!
Switching your text editor on an ARTICLE level
This is a new feature we’ve just added – you can change the text editor of an individual article in your world. Switching text editors on an article is super easy.
- Edit the article in Advanced Edit mode.
- Scroll to the bottom.
- You’ll find a little green button stating the current editor the article is using. Click it and a panel will expand like the one below.
- After you click the “Switch” button, the page will reload and the editor will have changed! Learn more about how to switch editors.
IMPORTANT WARNING: PLEASE READ THE NOTES on the page!
Due to technical constraints, some text editor switches are easy, and some are more risky.
- Switching to the Advanced Editor is now recommended as a one-way change (i.e. we don’t recommend switching back again).
- Switching to the Visual Editor is not recommended unless you’re 100% sure the article doesn’t have any advanced formatting (i.e. BBCode). If it does, the Visual Editor won’t be able to read your BBCode, and you might lose part of your content!
Which is the best text editor on World Anvil?
Well, that depends what you want! The Visual Editor and Advanced Editor both have their own strengths:
- The Visual Editor helps you get creative and handles basic formatting easily. You don’t need to use BBCode, so you can just focus on the worldbuilding.
- The Advanced Editor lets you create sophisticated and complex layouts with columns, custom containers, tagged lists, and much more. So it’s a great editor to use for making those articles go from great to gorgeous!
With this new system, you can enjoy the best of both worlds! For example, you can set your world to the Visual Editor, and use the Advanced Editor only for articles that need more advanced formatting.
If you’re worldbuilding with Players or Coauthors who can’t use BBCode, you can set their articles to Visual Editor so they don’t have to worry about it.
Visual Editor or Advanced Editor: which is your favorite and why? Let us know in the comments! <3
