Limitations of the current version of ConstEdit
- Only an English user interface UI is provided by the current version of ConstEdit. But this does not pose any limitation to the language of the document content. Practically any languages are supported by ConstEdit.
- Auto-capitalization and auto-convert are designed for the left-to-right layout direction. While these functions are not language-specific, they may not work satisfactorily for non-English languages, especially when the input direction is not left-to-right.
- Navigating back to a closed ConstEdit page. Once a ConstEdit editing session is closed or has exited, the closed editing session is dumped and is no longer reusable. You are able to bring back a closed ConstEdit page by using the "Go Back/Forward" buttons on the web-browser toolbar, or by restoring from the browsing history. But the page will no longer work properly. You need to start a new editing session through the ConstEdit Extension Icon on the toolbar.
- Access To Local Disk. For security reasons, a modern web browser disallows its extensions from accessing the local file system of the machine on which the web browser is running. Opening a document from the local hard disk to edit and saving an edited document to the local hard disk are not as straightforward as it is in a normal standalone word processor program.
- When you open a file to edit, you will be prompted to grant the permission to save changes to the file.
- When you open a file to edit, the location URL info of the file would not be available to the extension. In ConstEdit, therefore, only the file name is used for managing the Recent Files list. You need to be careful if you are working with files having duplicated file names. ConstEdit treats these files as the same item.
- In working with the word processor, there are cases when you are prompted to input a file location URL. The regular Open File Dialog is not applicable here because such dialogs would not return a URL to the extension. You have to input the file location URL manually into a textbox. ConstEdit provides some assistance in this case by allowing you to open a new tab for you to navigate to your desired file location, right-click on the desired file to copy its full link to the clipboard, so that you can then paste the link back into the textbox, instead of manually typing it.
- Automatic "Forced" Changes To Documents At Opening. When a document is opened, some changes are applied to the document automatically by ConstEdit to "normalize" it to ensure that it works exactly as expected. In fact these changes can all be considered as good practices and should be applied to all documents in all normal cases. In case you have special reasons to keep your document with the non-standards practices, you will have to make a copy manually.
- Standards & Compliance Modes. Web browsers render webpages differently when the pages are in standards mode than when in backward compatibility mode. In order to provide the latest rendering capabilities and the most reliable editing behavior, only the standards mode is supported by ConstEdit for editing. Documents in backward compatibility mode are all opened as standards mode. This change is set to the document at file opening.
- Document text encoding. All documents are opened as UTF-8 by ConstEdit, i.e. the encoding of the saved document is always UTF-8. The original file encoding is ignored. You may need to fix some of the text manually if you find that they are displayed incorrectly as weird characters. But this situation should be rare.
- Contenteditable element attribute. All such element attributes are removed from the html document, because they are not required by ConstEdit. The whole document will be editable when you open it in ConstEdit for editing. This attribute actually makes the document vulnerable to unexpected changes when it is opened for browsing only in a web browser.
- Script elements. All html "script" elements are removed from the html document at file opening. Scripts are not for document writers. They are for developers. This is not just for security concern but also is required technically to avoid a fatal exception related to the web browser security.
- Base element. A web-browser by default treats relative links as relative to the document location. Some html documents however may contain a "base" element which specifies a different location than the document's. To avoid such confusions, if an html "base" element is present in the original document, it will be removed at file opening. Using a base element is considered to be a bad practice for document authoring, because its effect is hidden to the end user and can be very misleading. It is designed only for developers of webpages to handle special requirements.
- Working Across Security Zones. Due to security concerns, any references from an html document located on a network location to a resource on a local disk is ignored. For example, when a stylesheet on a local hard disk is assigned to an html file on a network location, the document source code will be updated correctly by ConstEdit, but the layout and formatting are done as if the stylesheet is not there. Another example, if an html file saved on to a network location references an image file on the local hard disk, the image will not be displayed on the document although the html source code is correct. The same precaution is also taken by a web browser for any html files that is opened.
- Relative Links. ConstEdit does not support relative links.
- All new links added by ConstEdit will be written as absolute links.
- Existing relative links already present in an opened document will not work correctly, e.g. an image with a relative link will not be displayed successfully.
- An option is provided to convert all links to relative / absolute with respect to a specified location URL, to cater for any special requirements.
- Touch Devices. ConstEdit is designed for working with a mouse. For devices without a mouse :
- Popup tool-tips probably would not work, because there is no mouse cursor for hovering over the user interface to show the tool-tips.
- You may not be able to open the right-click menu (context menu), and to do drag-and-drop intuitively.
Known issues of the current version of ConstEdit
The issues listed below are found during our own internal testing. We do not have any technical solution to them yet. But the get-around for them is not difficult though.
- Drag-and-drop/copy/cut/paste actions of Audio and Video elements work properly only when the element is embedded within some text in the selection. That is to say, there must be selected text before & after the Audio or Video element, before these actions can be performed correctly as expected.
- When you use the "Print" button to print a document from the editing panel of ConstEdit, the document link location as shown in the footer would be the internal working location for the document, rather than the document's actual location. If you would like to show the correct document location in the footer, you have to :
- Save all unsaved changes to your document first.
- Open the document in a new web-browser tab.
- In the new tab just opened for the document, print from the web browser main menu or from the shortcut Ctrl+P.
- The printout will now show the correct document location in the footer.
- Undo History. Not all editing actions are logged into the undo history, i.e. not all editing actions can be undone normally. Normal typing, cut, paste, drag-and-drop are all undo-able. Many functions from the ConstEdit toolbar, however, cannot be undone. The document content could become not as expected if you perform too many undo steps. While this inadequacy would not cause any big issue during normal editing, it must be admitted that this could be quite an inconvenience in some cases.
- Font and Font Size during editing. It is found that there is a bug in Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge web-browsers which injects a style of Font and Font Size into extensions unnecessarily. In Windows, the injected Font style is Segoe UI with Size 75%. Normally, if no Font or Font Size is specified in an html document, the font styles as set in Settings > Appearance should be used. The injected font styles however overrides the web-browser settings. The document, when opened in ConstEdit for editing, will then look different from the same document opened for normal browsing in the web-browser.
- Note that this bug does not affect the normal ConstEdit editing actions and does not have any impact on the document content, but just the appearance.
- This bug affects only documents with stylesheets that do not have Font and Font Size specified for the Document element. The stylesheets font styles, if specified, overwrite the injected font styles in all cases.
- The work-around would be to specify in the external stylesheet used by the html document the desired Font and the desired Font Size for the "Document" element, which will then overwrite the injected styles.
- From ConstEdit 1.4 onwards, in Design Style Sheet For Html, the initial Startup settings and the bundled Stylesheets 1 to 4 all have an initial base value already assigned to the Font Size & Font Family of the "Document" element. All stylesheets created since v1.4 will be able to overwrite the undesired injected font styles successfully.