The Limitations of Text and HTML

Version 1.1 of DelightEd now opens and saves plain text and HTML . This support should be most useful for incorporating text and HTML in Rich Text documents; for example, you should be able to use it to copy and paste content like this link between documents.

The snag with plain text and HTML documents is that they don’t share support for bimodal text with DelightEd’s Rich Text. Here are some tips to help you work with them.

Plain Text

When you open a plain text file in DelightEd, its content is displayed in the default format and in the bimodal text colour. However, as it is saved as plain text, this doesn’t affect other apps in which you open that file: if they don’t support Dark Mode properly, then the plain text may not either. Your plain text document also lacks font and other styling, of course.

HTML

At present, there is no generally accepted way of implementing bimodal text in HTML. So when you save a document in HTML format, all text colour is frozen in the colours being displayed at the time, with bimodal text defaulting to black, not white. When you open that HTML file again in DelightEd, the default coloured text is then rendered in black, which make it vanish when in Dark Mode.

There are three solutions to this:

- select all affected text and change it to white. This works well so long as you only view that document in Dark Mode. The moment that you switch to Light Mode, that text remains white, and promptly vanishes, as it will in any browser.
- use the Endarken command to transform all the text (apart from links) to bimodal text. This works well for the moment, but isn’t saved to the HTML, so the next time that you open that document the text will appear as black on dark grey again.
- put that window into Light Mode to view and edit HTML. In most cases, this is the best solution, as it lets you see the HTML as it will be rendered by browsers.

Howard Oakley.

27 December 2018, version 1.1