Thursday, January 28, 2010

The Blogger in Draft line spacing bug - illustrated

In a kind rebuttal of my claim that Blogger is troubled, Rick Klau, a Google Product Manager, wrote:

… There is a new text editor available on www.blogger.com (available under settings) which is the default on Blogger in Draft. It significantly improves the authoring interface, addresses a number of the issues you referred to, and opens up a number of integration opportunities for us with other Google properties - we're doing QA on the next batch of integrations right now…

When I described the longstanding troubles I’ve had with the Blogger in Draft rich text editor Rick responded;

… Odd to hear about formatting problems with Draft's editor - it's pretty rock solid. Please ping me with any indications of what you're seeing - that's almost certainly a bug that we'll want to fix if it persist…

So I’m pleased to say I have a good example of the bug. I believe it’s related to the old CR/LF, CR, LF problems in DOS/Windows, MacOS and Unix – augmented by the transition to the unicode standard. (I’ve read recently that all of Google’s new tools require translation to unicode).

Here’s a recent post of mine, authored using Windows Live Writer (Windows only) as it renders in Chrome 4.0.249.78 after posting (it shows the same way in WLW):

VLW_view

Here’s how it looks in Blogger Classic using Chrome:

class_blogger

And here is how it renders in Blogger In Draft using Chrome:

BloggerInDraftView

Yes, the line spacing is wrecked. From past experience, this is messy to fix up. When you fix the line spacing here, it comes out double-spaced on publishing.

I’ll point Rick to this post. Hope it helps!

Update 1/29/10: Based on Rick's comment below, Google is looking into this one.

Update 2/1/2010: There's a similar bug with Safari on OS X. When you quote a block of text everything double spaces.

Update 3/10/2010: I just had blogger in draft completely screw up a post composed 100% in Chrome on XP. It's far from ready.

4 comments:

  1. Hey John, thanks for the report. Those paragraphs are likely enclosed in p tags, which don't work well with the new editor. We're working on a fix.

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  2. What's the update?

    I'm still having this issue and it's almost the end of the year.

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  3. I suspect the team has moved on, and a new team is starting from scratch. Blogger really does feel like a dying service.

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  4. Their developers need to take a look on the text editor tool.

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