WYSIWIG editors and preservation of HTML whitespace / formatting?

Thanks for the suggestion. I've tried tweaking that and all other wysiwyg module options, no matter what I do, I end up with HTML reformatted to remove all the line breaks. Next step is to try to hack the underlying CKEditor config manually, if there are options that will help (I've not found any yet).

And, doesn't "Apply source formatting" reformat the HTML source? What I want is a WYSIWYG HTML editor that leaves the underlying HTML formatting alone. Why? Well, because, when I decide not to use the WYSIWYG editor, I don't want to look at mangled HTML. Reformatting the source may help, but it's not really what I'm after.

It seems that JavaScript WYSIWYG editors parse the HTML DOM then rewrite the HTML on output. If that's the case, I really don't understand why they need to do this; many standalone WYSIWYG HTML editors (MS FrontPage, Visual Studio, Eclipse, etc) manage to provide visual WYSIWYG editing without altering the underlying HTML text...

While searching for more info on this behavior, I found this issue, in the CKEditor queue:

http://drupal.org/node/802136

When I disable rich-text so I can add some html code such as a div, after I save my changes and then go back to edit them later, all the spacing has been removed.

~ SNIP ~

It is simply technically impossible. You can however define in the CKEditor profile source formatting rules.

We use a different input format, with WYSIWYG deactivated by default, for nodes where we need careful control over the source format, say a complex table with inline styleseets.

Those cases are rare. Our biggest frustration is TinyMCE adding paragraph tags around the teaser break, which can lead to some rather odd formatting as well as problems with [http://drupal.org/project/ed_readmore|Read More Link]].

What I'm finding is that most (if not all) of these editors don't work very well with some of Drupal's features. For example, if you use the line break converter filter (the one that converts newlines into <br/> in the rendered HTML), you may not like the results with most WYSIWYG editors.

Since just about every Drupal input format I've ever used (or seen used) enables the line break converter, it's probably not a good idea to use a WYSIWYG editor with those formats -- as @choster said, it's probably better to have a special format for WYSIWYG-enabled editing, and never enable WYSIWYG operations with legacy content that depends on those formats for correct rendering (unless you want to spend time reformatting legacy node content due to inadvertent use of the WYSIWYG editor)

In TinyMCE, you can add a plugin called "code magic". This allows you to edit the html code in a nice little editor that keeps the html formatting and even highlights the tags.

AND there is even a drupal module to make it work here:

http://drupal.org/project/wysiwyg_codemagic

Using this you never even have to diable the rich text editor because you just edit the html through the plugin -button.

Hopt this helps someone.

R.

I noticed that in ckeditor-3.0.js (in wysiwyg module), there was an if, around line 52, that checked for settings.apply_source_formatting. Problem is, that setting never seemed to appear. settings.simple_source_formatting did appear, so it seemed like some of the additional settings offered by ckeditor to wysiwyg were not being carried into the bootstrap code.

I modified the line 52 to:

  if (settings.apply_source_formatting || settings.simple_source_formatting) {

I know it might not be perfect, but now I do pick up the extra source formatting capability by selecting the Apply Simple Source Formatting option in the cleanup and output for ckeditor.