Question
Why is an article's appearance different in the editor than in Help Center?
Answer
The Help Center editor is not a "what you see is what you get" editor. Instead, the editor is a "what you see is what you mean". The styling of articles while editing is generally different from how it looks when published.
The content structure and presentation are split. All styling options are done in the Help Center CSS which is then applied to the content upon publishing. This is the same principle that you find when working with Markdown: the intent versus the finished product.
The goal of the article editor is not to show how the article looks when published, but rather to allow you to build up the content that you then apply styles to afterward. This ensures consistency across articles, as opposed to using inline styles, which are difficult to change at a later stage and generally not recommended for web design.
The differences in editor versus published appearance are common when adding tables to Help Center articles.
5 Comments
What would cause text in published articles to appear the opposite of shown in the editor? All text that is bold is showing as normal and all text that is normal is showing as bold.
I made general styling updates to our help center recently (changed out logos and colors) and ever since those changes were applied the formatting of articles has been broken. These changes were made in the guide admin settings and not in the css file. At some point in every single article the text formatting switches to the reverse of what it is in the editor- please help!
Hi Maegan!
Welcome to the Zendesk Community! I'm sorry to hear that you've experienced formatting issues after making some changes to your theme.
From what I can see, you had also opened a support ticket with our team. It seems that your issue has been already resolved. However, if you have further questions, please feel free to reach out back to us and we'll be happy to help out!
I could you share the solution of this ticket 4861414, i'm experiencing the same issue
Hi Jean-Michel,
For the mentioned ticket, turns out the user has some custom stylings within the CSS of the help center. Adjustments to the CSS solved the issue.
Here's a related article: Why is an article's appearance different in the editor than in Help Center?
Michael Froeming in your comment https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408881835546/comments/4408889559962
the related article link is wrong, it is the article were we are right now.
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