One of the criticisms one hears about Drupal is that it does not include a WYSIWYG editor in the the core distribution.  I've never had much of an opinion about this one way or the other.  I do most of my substantial writing locally and use the old copy and paste technique to get the resulting xHTML that is generated into Drupal. 

For a number of years, I used an html editor called HomeSite for generating and testing my web pages and also as the tool for writing articles and blog posts.  It's not a WYSIWYG tool, but I've become quite adept at inserting the xHTML markup as I'm composing text over the years.  My mode of operation has changed recently and this is why:

To set the background for the remainder of this post, bear with me as I digress a bit. I had heard of  Windows Live Writer  (WLW), which is a WYSIWYG blog publishing application and decided to try it out as the tool for composing posts to my WordPress blog.  I had no great expectations as I was quite aware of the bloated xHTML markup generated by other Microsoft products such as Word.  Well, much to my surprise,  WLW not only  interfaced  seamlessly with WordPress, but it also generated efficient xHTML markup too.  And, in my opinion, has a feature set that is comparable with most of the embedded editors I have seen in various CMS and Blog software packages.  End of digression...

This got me to thinking.  Wouldn't it be nice to be able to use WLW with Drupal?  Well, I did some looking around and discovered that there is a 3rd-party module called Windows Live Writer BlogAPI. No doubt I was probably one of the last people in Drupal Land to find out about this!

I downloaded and installed the WLW-Blog API module and it works great.  As a matter of fact, I am sitting here composing this post using WLW.

So what has this all got to do with Drupal not having a WYSIWG editor in the core?  Well, for many who have Windows on their desktops, the absence of a WYSIWYG editor in Drupal's core becomes a non-issue, provided they install WLW.

Now to find a comparable application for my Linux laptop.  Anybody have a suggestion?