Finally, this is live now! In the Plain Text editor, simply click the “Preview” icon next to the Publish button, and you’ll get a popup with the fully-rendered post.
Please let us know what you think, bugs, feedback, etc!
Seems to work for a fairly simple page. Don’t see my custom CSS, but I don’t see that on private drafts anyhow (because how would it know which blog to pull the custom CSS from), so I can live with that.
Thanks, Matt!
1 Like
Glad it works! This was a quick solution, and we could technically pull in any custom style since it’s showing what’s generated by the server anyway, based on the blog selected in the editor. Would just have to re-work how it’s rendered so the styles are contained for the preview. So maybe we could do that in a future iteration.
Yeah. That would be nice eventually, but I try to do most of my previewing on a draft, where it can’t know. Once I move it to a specific blog, I’m hopefully done previewing, since that publishes it to the blog, unless I’m scheduling the publish, which I don’t think I’ve ever tried.
The new preview is a step in the right direction and I appreciate the feature but it’s not what I hoped.
The preview doesn’t render all the blog formatting and styling such as syntax highlighting of code blocks, clickable hashtags, MathJax, and YouTube videos and other embedded media. My blog has custom CSS for scrolling code blocks that are wider than the margins but the preview ignores it and wraps long lines instead.
The preview shows the post in an overlay that prevents from editing the Markdown source. I prefer having a preview in a separate page so that I can compare the source and preview side by side as well as edit while I check the preview.
A full preview would go through all the steps for formatting, styling, and publishing all the elements of a post but publish to a temporary private page instead of to the public blog. The preview I need should render an exact, complete copy of the post that’s going to be published to the blog.
1 Like
The other issue with the page not reloading after an edit is even worse in Chrome on a touch-Linux, based on ChromeOS, so I’m finding the preview invaluable, even with its restrictions.
But yeah, there’s definitely something wonky with the changed header. It doesn’t show up as modified immediately after I hit “publish,” and in general, if the page has been modified on another machine, it never shows up as changed until I manually reload.