WYSIWYG is an acronym for what you see is what you get. The term is used in computing to describe a system in which content displayed during editing appears very similar to the final output, which might be a printed document, web page, or slide presentation. [via Wikipedia]
BlueGriffon, an open source, cross-platform WYSIWYG editor has reached version 1.0. You can use it to edit / design web pages and supports CSS3 and HTML5, web forms, web fonts and more.
BlueGriffon uses the Firefox 4 rendering engine and is a great tool if you like using a WYSIWYG editor for designing web pages. Just like Firefox, BlueGriffon supports extensions and comes with 3 extensions by default, however, if you want more extensions you have to buy them. But don't worry, usually you won't need any extra extensions.
Even if you're used to coding your pages in Gedit, Geany, Vim or whatever, you'll still find BlueGriffon quite interesting thanks to its HTML5 and CSS3 support. Without much knowledge and with just a few clicks you can achieve some fancy CSS3 elements like text or box shadows, transitions, insert web fonts via Google Fonts Directory or FontSquirrel and more.
For example, to apply some CSS3 styling select the element you want to apply it to (some text, etc.), then click the "Set CSS styles" button and expand the style box you want to apply like "Shadows" for instance. Then click the "+" button, give your style a color, fill in all the sizes (blur radius, horizontal and vertical offset - for CSS 3 text shadows) and watch your page style changing.
BlueGriffon also comes with an extension SVG Edit - a SVG editor you can use to draw vectorial graphics from within BlueGriffon to embed them into your documents.
BlueGriffon does have an annoyance though, at least for me: sure, the toolbar is customizable just like in Firefox, but some features like the CSS3 Properties open in a new window and there's no way to integrate it into the main BlueGriffon window.
Run BlueGriffon in Ubuntu
Before running BlueGriffon 1.0, delete any old BlueGriffon profiles (only for those who have used BlueGriffon before):
rm -r ~/."disruptive innovations sarl"To run BlueGriffon in Ubuntu, download it from HERE - I suggest downloading the tar.bz2 and not the installer as you can easily run it from the extracted folder. There is a 32bit archive for Ubuntu 10.04 and a 64bit archive for Ubuntu 10.10. However, you can use them both in Ubuntu 10.10 and 11.04.
Then extract it and double click the "bluegriffon" file.
There are also Fedora, Windows and Mac OSX packages available to download @ BlueGriffon download page.
[News via linuxfr.org]
