Following the alpha release of the Stacks Editor, we got lots of feedback (including three out of the top four answers on the post, as well as other answers below and many comments) asking for a way to preview the rendered HTML generated from the Markdown being written, without having to switch the editor mode to rich text.
As promised in the post announcing the beta release, we are now happy to announce that a preview mode is now live in any places where it is available for testing: answers on MSO and MSE for users who have opted in. When in preview mode, the editor itself will be in Markdown mode and a live preview of the HTML (generate from the Markdown in the editor) will be rendered beneath. The HTML will be generated in the same way that it works today, including special Markdown extensions that we offer, like spoilers, auto-link generation, and tags (MathJax integration is not done yet, but it will be included before we offer the Stacks Editor on any site that has MathJax enabled).
Here is how it looks:
Just as it works today, whatever mode a user selects for the editor will be saved as a user preference and used the next time that they load the editor.
Though we do not have any dates or concrete plans yet in place for continuing the implementation and testing of the editor, our next steps will be:
- Graduation of the Ask Wizard for new askers on Stack Overflow, which features the Stacks Editor as its only editor option.
- Begin to offer the Stacks Editor for question asking to beta testers on MSO and MSE.
- Following completion of the different plugins needed to support Markdown extensions that are offered on sites across the network, begin offer users of additional sites the option to opt-in to beta-testing.
If you have feedback on preview mode or would like to report any issues that you see with it, please do so in answers below. General bugs or feature requests for the Stacks Editor should be reported in their own questions (tagged with stacks-editor) and/or as issues in GitHub (if possible, please check the list of issues reported in the beta announcement post before doing so, in order to avoid duplicates).