| [platform-text-dev] Rich Text editing |
Hello,this is my first post to the list and I hope I have come to the right place. The last couple of weeks, I have tried to become familiar with Java development in general and rich text editing in particular. Judging by the many questions asked in various forums, RTF seems to be a popular topic. I started out with Swing and found it to be pretty well designed and basically suitable for my purposes. However I quickly saw the many differences in look and behavior of the Swing UI elements compared to the platform it was running on. As you probably know, Swing has support for RTF, which extends also to pasting from the system clipboard. I was very surprised to find out that pasting RTF content is only possible at the end of a document, the current cursor position or selection is ignored. It basically renders Swing useless for me, but luckily OpenJDK is open source and problems could be fixed.
In any case, I really like what SWT has to offer in terms of truely native look & feel and I also find it adequately designed. I am not yet so convinced about many design decisions in JFace. By no means I could claim to have a complete understanding, but from what I have learned so far, it seems the text components in particular are very much targeted at the needs of editors as can be found in Eclipse. The TextEditor SWT example demonstrates that everything I need is technically possible with the StyledText component, however it does not demonstrate these capabilities in terms of JFace. There are some flaws which may or may not expose the fact that syntax highlighting editors are the main target, for example when defining a StyleRange for a range of text, positioning the cursor in that range and typing will not use the surounding TextStyle for the new text.
What I am wondering now is whether the JFace text framework and the StyledText component is perfect for my needs. Even if I implement my own IDocument, it seems to be inefficient to reset all the StyleRanges on the StyledText widget upon every insertion (if I understand things correctly). Perhaps it's a better idea to take all the related OpenJDK Swing text stuff and reimplement the relevant backends to target a new SWT widget. Judging by how many developers seem to face similar tasks as myself, I wonder if something similar has not yet been done. I would gladly receive some informed opinions and options. I would have no problem to contribute my work, should it be the best approach to write something new.
To recap: The users of my app would not be editing source code, I don't need continuous re-parsing of the text to divide it into partitions for syntax coloring. I would like to offer rich text editing and full integration with the system clipboard, when the contents are in RTF. Pretty much exactly what Swing offers with DefaultStyledDocument and JEditorPane, only without killer flaws like only being able to paste at the end of the document... and on top of SWT. :-)
Best regards, -Stephan