(idea) by Gruime Mon Mar 31 2003 at 15:18:39
The E2 Scratch Pad is a very nice feature, but as many noders here I prefer to use my powerful text editor and write my nodes offline. E2 applies special styles to the text (CSS) and the result is unfortunately sometimes very different from what would be expected.

Here is how to create a simple HTML E2 Offline Scratch Pad. It is not a program and it is very easy to use. Furthermore, even if E2 changes (a little) the steps will remain the same. Using this method does not mean you don't need to test your writeups in the real E2 Scratch Pad anymore. It only makes noding easier.

Just follow these simple steps :

  • Copy the E2 CSS stylesheet into a directory. You can download the stylesheet from http://www.everything2.com/styledef.css
  • Create a blank HTML file (for example my_node.html) and copy the HTML code below.
  • Write your node within the <BODY> and </BODY> tags.
  • Open it in your favorite web browser to test it.
If you are using the Ekw theme, you should copy the stylesheet from http://www.everything2.com/ekwcss/username.css instead and modify the line that shows href="styledef.css" to href="username.css". 
---8<--- E2 offline scratch pad ---8<---

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"
  "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"> 
<html>
<head>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styledef.css"/> 
<title>E2 Off-Line Scratch Pad</title>

</head>

<body
bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000" link="#003366"
vlink="#7f7f66" alink="#cccc99" topmargin="0"
marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" marginleft="2"
leftmargin="2" marginright="2" rightmargin="2"
>

<!-- write your node below -->


</body>
</html>

---8<--- E2 offline scratch pad ---8<---

Future additions :

A JavaScript piece of code could be added so it parses the brackets and converts them to dummy links so the result would be even more realistic. I'm not sure this is possible but I bet it is.

E2 also filters tags that are submitted (for example TABLE tags). It would be a good idea if the Offline E2 Scratch Pad was able to strip out those tags too.

I like it!