And by that I mean,
An http server that serves word-like rich formatted text documents and includes a web-based rich formatting text editor to write and edit these documents.
With some searching I found these might be candidates
Ghost
WriteFreely / Write.as
Plume
And maybe the following editors in some kind of standalone mode
TipTap
Editor.js
Quill.js
CKEditor 5
Slate.js
There are probably thousands of different static website generators that can make a more beautiful website out of the box, for free.
I want something that is more akin to using microsoft word except it’s in the browser and not made by satan Something I can recomment to people and know they’re not going to come back to me and ask “what is a markdown code block”
StackEdit is a good rich text to markdown web application: https://stackedit.io/
As far as the editor, this is great. I pasted formatted text out of libre office into it and everything was fine except the images. Way better than a lot of the options here.
Althought one caveat, and it might be a big one,
It seems it can’t actually host files publicly, you need to publish them to a third party cloud hosting platform…
But other wise, it’s very nice…
There has to be a way !
Look into the GitHub integration. Your pipeline could be StackEdit -> GitHub + GitHub Actions -> Self-hosted final destination.
SSG are really a pain in the ass to work with, especially if you want something other than the standard theme.
Maybe if you don’t know CSS?
The problem isn’t really CSS, it’s that each theme has its own components with their own rules you have to learn. There’s no real standardization even within one kind of SSG.
It would literally be much easier to just write everything the old fashioned way by hand.