Hmm...well...
Here’s the problem...textareas themselves aren’t measured by width and height but rather by the number of characters in width and lines by height. The only way to set the width and height of a textarea with pixels is with CSS. Now, with this being said, there are some limitations of all the main editors, FCKeditor included.
By default FCKeditor is set to 100% width, which means that it’ll expand out to the width of the are where the textarea is. Hacking up the code to get FCK to detect the width of the original textarea will be quite a task...one that I would recommend for the original programmers since they have more insight into the code. If we do it ourselves then...well...we’ll have to do this to every editor we plugin to MODx.
I’ve played around with some of the other editors, TinyMCE and Xinha specifically. They both exhibit similar behavior to some degree. TinyMCE seems to pick up on the character width and line height of the textarea...but only to a point. If the width goes below the width of the toolbar, then it’ll retain the width of the toolbar and show just the width of the textarea. TinyMCE just doesn’t do anything to collapse the toolbar the same way FCK does. Xinha is another story...it’s somewhat tempermental though a width can be set manually.
Both TinyMCE and FCK can be forced to a specific width rather simply (though TinyMCE will still have the toolbar issue). Basically, if you wrap the textarea with a DIV and give the DIV a specific width, then the editor will conform with the width of the DIV. Pretty simple. However, Xinha may prove to be a little more problematic. Still need to work with it to discover all it’s little quirks.
That’s where we stand for now. I’ll be playing with them some more and will hopefully have a better answer sometime soon.
