CKEditor - Indent and Outdent

[stpaultim]

Description of the bug

I can't find another issue on this and am not sure if it's a bug or a misunderstanding about expectations. The problem is that the indent and outdent options in CKEditor do not seem to work as I expect.

Is this a bug?
Are my expectations unusual?

Steps To Reproduce

To reproduce the behavior:

1. Spin up a DEV or Demo site
2. Edit the Basic Test Editor to include in the indent and outdent buttons in the toolbar. Save this change.

3. Go to create a new page. Add a few paragraphs of text and try to indent one of them.

4. If you make one of them into a bullet or list item, you can then use the outdent to remove it as a bulleted item.

5. Add a second item to the list, now I can indent and outdent items.

What am I missing? Or is this a bug?

Is this how Tiny MCE works?

Expected behavior

I expect to be able to indent or outdent any line or paragraph.

Additional information

I reproduced this on a Backdropcms.org demo site.

[stpaultim]

I have a Drupal 7 site that seems to allow indent and outdent on any line of text. I'm not sure if this is default behavior of if other modules are involved.

Looks like the Drupal 7 site may be using Tiny MCE 3.

[indigoxela]

Is this a bug?
Are my expectations unusual?

Thing is: in CKE5 indent/outdent is used for lists exclusively.

If you really, really need that for block elements (like p, div...), you could use contrib TinyMCE, but keep in mind, that indent/outdent for block elements requires inline CSS, hence the "limit allowed html" filter to be off.

See this contrib issue: backdrop-contrib/tinymce#143

Looks like the Drupal 7 site may be using Tiny MCE 3

With disabled "limit html..." filter, I guess. And Tiny v3 is really outdated. More than just a bit. 😉

So, is this a bug or a missing feature in CKE5? I don't know.
Given, that you're the first to ask this in core queue, I'd say it's no 80% use-case, and pretty old-school, too - for modern, responsive websites.

[stpaultim]

I'm leaning heavily toward TinyMCE for this client. We'll be testing it in the next few days.

Thanks for your answer. You are the EXPERT on this! :-)

Also - I'm not sure this client needs this functionality. But, they did have it on the Drupal 7 site and noticed it was missing.

[indigoxela]

I'm not sure this client needs this functionality. But, they did have it on the Drupal 7 site and noticed it was missing.

Personally, I'd try to convince them, that this isn't appropriate for a modern website. It's not mobile friendly at all. And think of the bad A11Y (it's only visual, not semantic).

And keep the security aspect of turning off "limit allowed html..." in mind. Only ever consider that, if the number of editors on the site is small and privileged, never do it for self-registered accounts.