Help:Extension:WikiEditor/Realtime Preview

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Realtime Preview is a feature within WikiEditor that allows you to preview your changes in realtime while you are typing. It was created by the Wikimedia Foundation's Community Tech team in response to the #4 wish in the 2021 Community Wishlist Survey.

Usage

First make sure you have WikiEditor enabled (which it is by default). In your Preferences, look for the "Enable the editing toolbar" preference. Note that Realtime Preview is not available in the 2017 wikitext editor .

Start editing a page. Notice that in the toolbar, you will see a "Preview" button. Clicking this will activate realtime preview. Once activated, a preview pane is shown next to the wikitext editing area. It will update every time you stop typing.

There is also a Reload button available in the toolbar (next to the Preview button) that can be used to manually reload changes. The ) access key can also be used for this purpose. Manual reloading may be useful after making changes in separate browser tabs for example, to see the changes applied to the current page. The Reload button previously would only appear when hovering on the preview pane, and some documentation may still refer to that.

The editing and preview panes can be resized by dragging the middle dividing bar to the left or right. The height of both can also be adjusted by dragging the bottom resizing border. Your size preferences are stored in your browser, and will be maintained for future editing sessions (this is a per-device preference, because screen sizes can vary between devices).

Limitations

Absolutely positioned elements are shown relative to the entire page, and not just the preview pane. If you need to test what your changes look like for the entire page, use the whole-page "Show preview" button. (phab:T310064)
When using both realtime preview and the whole-page preview, some user interaction requiring JavaScript might apply to only one preview area and not the other, such as the "show" and "hide" links on collapsible content. (phab:T307475)
If your browser window is too narrow, realtime preview is automatically disabled and you will have to use the whole-page "Show preview" button to preview your changes.

Hiding the button

If you do not want the "Preview" button to appear in your toolbar, you can hide it by adding the following to your common.css:

.tool[rel="realtimepreview"] {
    display: none;
}