Article Preview
Buy Now
FEATURE
Formatted Text Control
An Awesome EditField (And More!) Replacement
Issue: 6.6 (September/October 2008)
Author: Bob Keeney
Author Bio: Bob is the founder of BKeeney Software, a REALbasic consulting firm located in Kansas City. He is the current president of the Association of REALbasic Professionals.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 15,118
Starting Page Number: 18
Article Number: 6610
Related Web Link(s):
http://bkeeneybriefs.com/files/8349315cec39e0f29a229936ffbd0a47-24.html
http://"
Excerpt of article text...
The standard REALbasic editfield is sufficient for many developers. In RB2007 release 2, REAL Software added the ability to read and write a subset of the Rich Text Format (RTF) specification using StyledText. This was a big step forward and, for many developers, this was good enough for their needs.
It soon became apparent, however, that the StyledText implementation had some pretty serious flaws. Users soon discovered that the implementation was different from platform to platform with Macintosh OS X being affected by some crippling speed issues (including a lengthy BKeeney Briefs blog post at
http://bkeeneybriefs.com/files/8349315cec39e0f29a229936ffbd0a47-24.html ). StyledText does not support images of any kind so it really doesn't support Rich Text Format (RTF), an industry standard.The standard REALbasic editfield does not support a page layout view, zoom in, zoom out, spell checking, or multiple layers of undo (though spell checking and undo can be developed by subclassing the control). In general, the editfield control is the most basic of controls with not a lot of buzzers and bells. For the most part, it works as long as you don't stretch it too much.
...End of Excerpt. Please purchase the magazine to read the full article.