Hi Remi,

we have tried different text export methods. In fact, early versions had no explicit line positioning and exported text by paragraphs (1 paragraph = 1 <div>). But it failed for us. First of all, it's important to note, that WYSIWYG is generally higher in our priority list than editability, which is second and should not influence the outlook of the result. From its point of view it is obvious that we would try to provide as much editability as possible, as long as exported page looks the same as it's design in Xtreme. And there are a couple of reasons (actually a lot of, but most are less important so I skip them) why paragraph export fails to produce good enough WYSIWYG result.

1. Repelling is of course the reason everyone think of first. And yes, it is impossible to recreate all possible kinds of Xtreme text repelling using CSS2 features on a single text paragraph. For example, it is impossible to export a single paragraph with repelling object placed in the middle of it, effectively splitting some lines in two. Never mind the multiple repelling objects placed like this.

2. There's no way for HTML to render text with tab chars correctly. And we have a couple of complex tab types in Xtreme together with ability to set their positions manually. Using explicit text positioning allows us to export them, making Xtreme unique in this respect.

3. Precision of the line spacing in browsers is horrible. It may be not noticeable for small texts, but when you export a large text column, it's height in different browsers varies greatly.

4. Automatic line brakes are not acceptable because they are completely unpredictable and resulting text block may contain a couple of lines more than intended.

And so on...

We were really trying to avoid as much of these problems as possible still using paragraph export, but finally it proved to be anything but WYSIWYG.**