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There is a new tech preview build of Windows Live Writer available. It doesn’t address all the concerns but it is a pretty big step in the right direction. Most importantly it does not escape characters in the body (see below) anymore unless it is special chars like ampersand (&) etc. Not a big deal for those that blog in English, but for the rest of the world it has been a hellish experience. It has presumably ruined SEO, broken internal blog searches and made it impossible to manipulate the text input using various plugins (like Transliterado).
Other selected improvements include: Image cropping and tilting, Auto Linking, Additional border styles (Reflection!), Support for LightBox. The interface also seems a little quicker, and editing text next to an aligned image is no longer a problem. Software also seems to load faster.
What still remains to be done of course is per blog language support for more languages, and direct access to class / id / title attributes for images with a default per blog setting ideally. And some way to control the image encoding in more detail (especially when pasting an image which always seems to result in a PNG) to fine-tune file compression and format. For the above image I had to save it as a JPG before inserting it into Writer and doing the reflection border. With the reflection and at this size it weighs in at 24 kb. Just pasting it would invariably create a PNG around 75 kb. Now that Writer is able to crop and manipulate images more extensively, pasting has suddenly become a lot more interesting. It saves a lot of time not having to load CS3 just to crop a crummy image.
So, to sum it all up, more expert settings for those that want them. The language situation is the most dire though, and the Live dev team is acutely aware of this as I understand it.
Addendum #1: Writer still escapes characters in the subject / title field. So Transliterado is still a no-go. If you look at the typography for the letter “Ö” it does not, like it used to in the body, convert it to a numerical XML entity. Rather, it converts it to an HTML entity. For a moment I thought that WordPress was the culprit, but opening and re-saving the post from WP does in fact remove all entities.
Addendum #2: Seems I didn’t do my homework regarding the html entities in titles. Turns out you can turn it off manually (“requiresHtmlTitles”), either via the manifest file on your server (wlwmanifest.xml in the case of wordpress), or via the windows registry. I tried the registry fix, which also works on a per blog basis (I run a virtual multiblog so any changes to the manifest would be shared) and I finally got Transliterado working with Swedish characters. Cheers! I wonder why the wlw devs didn’t tell us this right away when we inquired about entities.
