Configure the Rich Text Editor configure-the-rich-text-editor

The Rich Text Editor (RTE) provides authors with a wide range of functionality for editing their text content. Icons, selection boxes, toolbar, and menus are provided for a WYSIWYG text-editing experience.

To know how to use RTE features for authoring, see Use Rich Text Editor for authoring. RTE can be configured to enable, disable, and extend the features available in the authoring components. The following workflow illustrates a recommended order of completing the RTE configuration tasks in Experience Manager.

Figure: Sequence of steps to learn how to configure RTE

Understand Touch-enabled UI and Classic UI understand-touch-enabled-ui-and-classic-ui

The Touch-enabled UI is the standard user interface for Experience Manager. Adobe introduced Touch-enabled UI with responsive design for authoring environment. The Touch-enabled UI is designed for touch and desktop devices. The interface differs considerably from the original Classic UI.

Figure: Rich Text Editor toolbar in Touch-enabled UI

Figure: Rich Text Editor toolbar in Classic UI

Various modes of editing editingmodes

Authors can create and edit textual content in Experience Manager using the different modes of components. The toolbar options for authoring and formatting content and the user experience of RTE-enabled components in different editing mode varies based on RTE configurations.

Inline editing inline-editing

When opened (with a slow double-click) the content can be edited within the page. A compact toolbar with very basic options is presented.

Figure: Inline editing with basic toolbar in Touch-enabled UI

In Classic UI, a slow double-click the component allows inline editing and an orange outline highlights the content. If the Content Finder is open, a toolbar with the available RTE formatting options is displayed at the top of the window. If the Content Finder is not open, the formatting options are not displayed and you can do basic text edits only.

Full screen editing full-screen-editing

Experience Manager components can be opened in full screen view that hides the page content and occupies the available screen. Consider full screen editing a detailed version of the inline editing as it offers the most editing options. It can be opened by clicking , from the compact toolbar when using the inline editing mode.

In the dialog full screen mode, along with a detailed RTE toolbar, the options and components available in a dialog are also available. It is applicable only for a dialog that contains RTE alongside other components.

Figure: The detailed RTE toolbar when editing in full screen mode in Touch-enabled UI

Dialog editing dialog-editing

When a component is double-clicked a dialog box opens for editing the contents. The dialog box opens on top of the existing page. In some specific scenarios, the dialog opens as a pop-up window. For example, when a Text component is part of a column in a multi-column page layout and the area available for the dialog is less.

Figure: Dialog editing mode in Touch-enabled UI

Figure: Dialog box in Classic UI that contains detailed toolbar for editing

About RTE plug-ins and the associated features aboutplugins

The functionality is made available via a series of plug-ins, each with:

Basic features of the RTE are activated, or deactivated, by the value of the features property on a node specific to the appropriate plug-in.

The following table lists the current plug-ins, showing:

Understand the configuration paths and locations understand-the-configuration-paths-and-locations

The mode of RTE editing (and the UI) that you provide for your authors decide the location for the configuration details when you are activating the RTE plug-ins:

Configure the following properties that apply in Dialog editing mode in Touch UI only:

When RTE is used in the touch-enabled dialog, setting the property useFixedInlineToolbar to true is mandatory to avoid issues.

Customizing in place editing customizing-in-place-editing

You can define on which HTML selector the text editor starts by configuring the following properties:

The corresponding property for dialog mode is name.

Enable RTE functionalities by activating plug-ins enable-rte-functionalities-by-activating-plug-ins

RTE functionalities are made available via a series of plug-ins, each with features property. You can configure the features property to enable or disable the various features of each plug-in.

For detailed configurations of the RTE plug-ins, see how to activate and configure the RTE plug-ins.

Sample: Download this sample configuration that illustrates how to configure RTE. In this package all the features are enabled.

Configure RTE toolbar dialogfullscreen

AEM lets you configure the interface for the Rich Text Editor differently for the different editing modes. The default settings are provided below. You can override these defaults based on your requirements. You customize only the toolbar features that you want to provide to your authors. You do not need to specify all the toolbar configurations.

To configure the toolbar for dialogFullScreen, use the following sample configuration.

<uiSettings jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured">
  <cui jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured">
    <inline
      jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured"
      toolbar="[format#bold,format#italic,format#underline,#justify,#lists,links#modifylink,links#unlink,#paraformat]">
      <popovers jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured">
        <justify
          jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured"
          items="[justify#justifyleft,justify#justifycenter,justify#justifyright,justify#justifyjustify]"
          ref="justify"/>
        <lists
          jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured"
          items="[lists#unordered,lists#ordered,lists#outdent,lists#indent]"
          ref="lists"/>
        <paraformat
          jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured"
          items="paraformat:getFormats:paraformat-pulldown"
          ref="paraformat"/>
      </popovers>
    </inline>
    <dialogFullScreen
      jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured"
      toolbar="[format#bold,format#italic,format#underline,justify#justifyleft,justify#justifycenter,justify#justifyright,justify#justifyjustify,lists#unordered,lists#ordered,lists#outdent,lists#indent,links#modifylink,links#unlink,table#createoredit,#paraformat,image#imageProps]">
      <popovers jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured">
        <paraformat
          jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured"
          items="paraformat:getFormats:paraformat-pulldown"
          ref="paraformat"/>
      </popovers>
    </dialogFullScreen>
    <tableEditOptions
      jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured"
      toolbar="[table#insertcolumn-before,table#insertcolumn-after,table#removecolumn,-,table#insertrow-before,table#insertrow-after,table#removerow,-,table#mergecells-right,table#mergecells-down,table#mergecells,table#splitcell-horizontal,table#splitcell-vertical,-,table#selectrow,table#selectcolumn,-,table#ensureparagraph,-,table#modifytableandcell,table#removetable,-,undo#undo,undo#redo,-,table#exitTableEditing,-]">
    </tableEditOptions>
  </cui>
</uiSettings>

Different UI settings are used for the inline mode and full screen mode. The toolbar property is used to specify the buttons of the toolbar.

For example, if the button is itself a feature (for example, Bold), it is specified as PluginName#FeatureName (for example, links#modifylink).

If the button is a popover (containing some features of a plug-in), it is specified as #PluginName (for example, #format).

Separators (|) between a group of buttons can be specified with -.

The pop-up node under inline or full-screen mode contains a list of the popovers being used. Each child node under the ‘popovers’ node is named after the plug-in (for example, format). It has a property ‘items’ containing a list of features of the plug-in (for example, format#bold).

RTE user interface settings and content policies rtecontentpolicies

Administrators can control the RTE options using content policies, say instead of doing the configuration as described above. Content policies define the design properties of a component when used as part of an editable template. For example, if a text component that uses the RTE is used with an editable template, the content policy can define that the bold option be available and a few paragraph formatting options be available. Content policies are reusable and can be applied across multiple templates.

The available options in the RTE flow downstream from the user interface configurations to the content policies.

As an example, you can see the Text Core Component documentation.

Customize mapping between toolbar icons and commands iconstoolbar

You can customize the mapping between Coral icons displayed on the RTE toolbar and the available commands. You cannot use any other icons besides Coral icons.

Below is a sample snippet to map the command Bold to the Coral icon named textItalic.

<text jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured" sling:resourceType="cq/gui/components/authoring/dialog/richtext" name="./text" useFixedInlineToolbar="{Boolean}true">
    <rtePlugins jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured">
        <format jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured" features="bold,italic"/>
    </rtePlugins>
    <uiSettings jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured">
        <cui jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured">
            <inline jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured"
                toolbar="[format#bold,format#italic,format#underline,links#modifylink,links#unlink]">
            </inline>
            <icons jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured">
                <bold jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured"
                    command="format#bold"
                    icon="textItalic"/>
            </icons>
        </cui>
    </uiSettings>
</text>

Switch to CoralUI 2 Rich Text Editor switch-to-coralui-rich-text-editor

On a page, you can either include CoralUI 2 RTE clientlib or the CoralUI 3 RTE clientlib. By default, Rich Text Editor includes the CoralUI 3 RTE clientlib. To switch to CoralUI 2 RTE, perform the following steps.

Further Information further-information

For more information about configuring the RTE, see the AEM Widget API reference.

In particular, to see the plug-ins and related options available:

These can be used to extend and customize your own RTE. For example, to list the anchors available in the page when creating a link you can provide your own implementation of the LinkPlugin.

Known limitations known-limitations

AEM RTE capability has the following limitations:

Best practices and tips best-practices-and-tips

Troubleshoot frequent issues with RTE troubleshoot-issues-with-aem-rich-text-editor

How to select multiple table cells?

To select multiple cells in a table, press Ctrl or Cmd key and then click the table cells one-by-one.

Now perform operation on the selection, say set the properties of the selected cells.

Hyperlinks are lost when editing a component using Configure button

Add a hyperlink in a text component by editing it using the Configure button. You may lose the hyperlink when editing it again and validating the hyperlink for the second time.

A workaround is to click in the text component when the edit dialog is displayed the second time and then run the link validation.

This issue is resolved in AEM 6.3 and later.

HTML content added in source-edit mode is lost

Do not add a XSS-prone HTML. AEM, and not RTE, may remove some HTML content to adhere to the XSS antisamy rules.

To verify that the pasted HTML is saved, check the saved content in CRXDE (in the content node).

If not saved, the HTML must have been removed by RTE as it did not adhere to the RTE’s rules.

If saved in CRXDE but not rendered on the Page (to check rendering, see page’s preview, it is removed by AEM XSS rules.

Multifield component is not working as expected

To create multifield component, use CoralUI 3 exclusively. Do not use CoralUI 2 component dialogs.

Also, verify that your multifield implementation code and node structure are correct.

Configuration available to administrators are not available to authors

If the interface configurations updates are reflected for administrators but not for author accounts, ensure that the configuration node is not named config. Use the configPath property.