Re: [platform-text-dev] Rich Text editing

[Daniel Megert <daniel_megert@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Stephan,

this list is for the developers of Platform Text. Please use the newsgroups
for questions. To me it looks like 'eclipse.platform.swt' is the right
place to start.

To give you a first answer: SWT (StyledText) offers some initial
capabilities but the Text framework is currently not supporting RTF in any
way.

Dani

platform-text-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote on 18.12.2010 10:37:14:

> From:
>
> Stephan Aßmus <superstippi@xxxxxx>
>
> To:
>
> platform-text-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
>
> Date:
>
> 18.12.2010 10:37
>
> Subject:
>
> [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
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