A better editor for lesson and course copy

Writing a course description used to involve a guess. The editor laid your paragraphs out one way and the published page laid them out another, because the two were not reading the same rules: the renderer stripped empty paragraphs and swapped every line break for a fixed spacer, while the editor spaced things with a layout gap. Blank lines you added on purpose vanished at publish time, and pasted content from Word arrived carrying styles that belonged to another document.

It got worse the second time you opened the page. Each editor kept its own idea of which markup was allowed, and they disagreed, so the same description could be normalized one way when saved from the course editor and another way when saved from a dialog. That is the shape of the bug people kept reporting: formatting that survived a save and then disappeared on the next one.

The editor is now built on TipTap, and the editor and the published page share one stylesheet and one set of rules about what markup is allowed. Saving is lossless for anything authored in the app, and content written before the change is upgraded to the new shape once, rather than being rewritten on every render. Every editor in the admin panel uses it: courses, lessons, instructors, announcements, and the dialogs inside them.