[platform-text-dev] Rich Text editing

[Stephan Aßmus <superstippi@xxxxxx>]

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