Lo and behold, your Rich Text Editor for 2026.

It's the original one with a facelift.

One or two superfluous things have been removed,

and there is the addition of a "corners" button as indicated.

The reason for returning to the original will be explained in the Javascript/JQuery Tools & Tips section. Initially, I was worried about the stability of this version. Happily, with the passing of time, it has become more stable. This seems to indicate that years back, my coding was OK, but the browser's handling was not. In 2026, the use of an improved Firefox browser makes a difference.

One general limitation remains. If you select some text, it won't report the CSS properties of it. The menus only enable you to SET the font-family, size, colour, etc. In practice, this is not SO important. Your rich text will consist of one, two or three varieties at most, and you can easily remember the settings for them. Attempting to introduce CSS reporting into it in its current form would require major surgery and would probably lead to instability. So I have decided to "leave well enough alone".

It is hardly necessary to say, but what you do is type some text, select it (or part of it), and choose the tailoring required using the buttons and menus in the bar at the top.

What follows is a quick run through of the items on the bar.

These are simple toggle buttons. Clicking once on them applies the CSS property to the selected text. Clicking on them again removes the property. Other font weights, styles and decorations are not offered here. The font families available do not permit most of these variations anyway. But text decorations such as strike-through, overline, etc. can be inserted manually when you save your script to file.

Snapshots/Restore Points are automatically saved at regular intervals while you are editing.

Clicking on these buttons will navigate backwards and forwards through the snapshots.

When the snapshot from which you would like to resume is displayed, just carry on editing to modify it further if required.

Alignment of entire lines of text can be set on the left, centre or right of the editing box. Just select (or partially select) the line(s) you wish to justify, and click on the appropriate button.

You can create lists with bullets (round blobs) or numbers on the left hand side of each line, as illustrated on the buttons themselves. Type your text, and select the lines you wish to be defined as a list. Then click on the appropriate button. They are toggle buttons, so clicking once on them will format the list, and clicking on them again will remove the formatting.

After selecting your text as requiired, click on the first button to give it the kind of indentation and spacing which is suitable for a quotation. It is not a toggle button, so to remove it, click once on the button on the extreme right.

The "Add Indentation" button in the middle is different. After selecting your text as required, clicking successively on it will give you a greater and greater indentation on the left. To lessen the indentation progressively, click repeatedly on the "Remove Indentation" button on the right-hand side. Eventually, it will disappear completely if that's what you need.

The dropdown lists of these buttons allow you to apply the size and colour of the items shown.

If you require a border around your text, use the border button 3 times in order to set its width, style and colour.

Clicking on these buttons will open a drop-down list for you to choose the font-family of your selected text.

If you choose a web font, you do not need to worry about its display on your target platform (i.e. Linux, Windows, Macintosh, etc.).

The text will be identical wherever it is displayed.

Choosing system fonts is different. These are the fonts installed specifically on Linux, Windows, Macintosh, etc. A given font might exist on one system, but not on another. If you choose a font which is not installed on the target platform, a substitute font will be used instead, and it might not be appropriate. So only choose these fonts if you are absolutley sure that they are installed on your target platform(s).

Immediately above, you see the simple usage of underlining in order to draw attention to something important, such as a heading.

However, there is a possibly important secondary usage of underlined words. They can indicate LINKS which, when clicked, will navigate your browser to another web page either in the same tab, or in a separate tab. (There is an example of this above in the discussion of corner radiuses: clicking on the "HERE" link will cause the browser to navigate to the w3Schools website in an additional tab.)

Whatever you underline can be associated to a navigational link, if that is what you choose to do. Or not.

After typing up your text with underlines in it and SAVING, which returns you to the main editor, you will see something like this:

In the case where you need to re-edit/correct your rich text widget, double-click on it to open up the Rich Text Editor once more.

If the widget already contains navigational links, this alert will appear:

If corner rounding of the text box is required, clicking on the "corners" button will open up a little dialogue in which you can specify the radius of the 4 corners in pixels. Type in the radius followed by ENTER to apply it.

The specification of radiuses is in fact a rather complex subject. See HERE for an idea of what can be involved.

That said, for normal boxes, I personally use values of between 0 pixels and 99 pixels to get the appearance I need.

Zero will give you no rounding at all, and 99 will give you a box which is completely circular if it was originally square, like this:

Elongating the text box looks like this:

Useful for making buttons, as you can see.

If the underlines are no longer needed, use the Editor to remove them. Or perhaps other underlines are needed, so make the alterations as necessary. If you still need links to be associated to your underlined words, then they can be re-introduced once you get back into the main editor.

When only a few underlines+links are involved, the necessity of speciifying them again is no big deal, but when you have a lot of underlines+links in your text, the process of re-introduction is of course rather painful. See for example the Contents page of the Full Help for webprog3. It is quite a long list that consists of nothing other than text lines with a link in each one. It contiuously grows in size and requires re-editing which, if this Rich Text Editor was used to maintain it, would be terribly tedious.

In cases such as the above, you are advised not to use the Rich Text Editor at all! There is a special Utility app for creating and maintaining long text lists with links in them. See HERE for further details.