The new Steam visual editor will let developers edit store pages in real time

Valve has reworked the Steam visual editor so developers can edit and update their store pages in real time.

The new ‘What You See Is What You Get’ (WYSIWYG) editor provides a real-time preview of the ‘About This Game’ section, letting users visualize how text, images, and other formatting options appear on-page without relying on ‘beta’ mode previews (though that’s still a viable option).

Valve has also made it easier to paste content into the new editor from Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and other writing tools without needing to reformat—but there are a few caveats.

“You can easily paste that content into the new editor and preserve all the supported formatting. bulleted list, headlines, italics, and more,” reads a Steamworks blog.

“Note that there are some limitations to how Steam can interact with the Windows clipboard. Copying a mix of images and text from web sources (web-based Word docs or Google Docs) should work well, but other sources won’t always be able to preserve the images. Copying and pasting an image individually seems to work just fine.”

Drag and Drop is now an option

It’s now also possible to drag-and-drop images directly into the visual editor. As mentioned above, they can also be pasted in from a word document.

“Any uploaded image will also be saved in the ‘Custom Images’ section, which itself has also received an update to more clearly present the uploaded images. And of course you can still work the previous way by specifically selecting and uploading files in the ‘Upload Custom Images’ section and then insert them into your description,” continues the blog.

Swapping out images is a simple as hitting the ‘edit’ icon in the corner of any image that’s already in the editor and choosing a different file. Other helpful WYSIWYG additions include s spellcheck functionality, keyboard shortcuts, undo/redo buttons, and automatic formatting.

The editor can even be used to tweak ‘Awards’ and ‘Special Announcements’ sections.’ Valve noted that anybody who prefers using the bbcode editor can switch between to new editor and the old one, but said the pivot “won’t be pretty.”

“The new editor does continue to write bbcode, but is not optimized for human-readable presentation,” reads the blog. “Good luck.”