Silverlight rich text editor

New Post: how to unselect movecursor()?

vgopinath — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 23:30:02 GMT

Hi,

First my real appreaciation for a wonderful RTF for SL, Great Control.

After [programatically!] inserting a lengthy text (Scroll bar apprears), the mouse cursor is moved to the end of the text, which scrolls the text all the way down. Now, using

RichEdit.QueryText().MoveCursor(0); --> pushes the cursor to top of the RTF, but then i cannot set focus on any other controls on the page? Even after manually focussing other controls [like textbox] when i move the
mouse over the RTF, the focus is back to RTF Control?

Is there a way to unfocus()?

Thanks,

Gopi

Updated Release: RichTextEdit Beta 2.0 (Jun 08, 2008)

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 15:58:16 GMT

*********************************************************************************************************************
I AM CURRENTLY SEARCHING FOR SOMEONE WHO WILL CONTINUE DEVELOPING THIS EDITOR, BECAUSE I DONT HAVE THE TIME TO ADD FURTHER IMPROVEMENTS!!!! IF YOU ARE INTERESTED, PLEASE CONTACT ME!
*********************************************************************************************************************

ATTENTION: This release is for Silverlight 2 Beta 2 only and won't work with Beta 1! I don't think that anyone will continue with Beta 1 but don't forget to download the latest silverlight development tools before you are trying to compile the source code or to display the demo!

Changes:

- Some weird fixes to support Silverlight 2 Beta 2...
- "RichTextEdit.Background" is no longer supported, use "RichTextEdit.BackgroundColor" instead... A transparent color value is not supported for background!
- I am also happy to announce that the control is much more stable than in the silverligth 2 beta 1 release...

TODO:

- An XAML style file to remove the TextBox border and cursor would allow to still support the "Background" property. Currently I am using a control to hide both and this is why it can't be transparent as well...
- Further performance improvements and better rendering... Wait for Silverlight 2 final to get those! Only god knows what will be changed till then and Microsoft will have to change a lot, again...

-------
You will find a comprehensive Demo Project in the package "Complete source code"...

- "Binary files" contains the final control DLL and a proper XML documentation
- "Complete source code" contains "Binary files" and all project files

Please note that the following files have not been changed since "RichTextEdit Beta 1.0" release:

- "Introduction" contains a brief overview about the component
- "Documentation" contains an extensive compiled HTML help file which refers to all public methods, classes and properties

Updated Wiki: Home

ChristophHusse — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 15:57:57 GMT

Copy/Paste formatted text between RichTextBoxes and copy/paste from/to clipboard of unformatted but macro-enabled text. This means in windows clipboard even things like emoticons will be kept.
You may insert line breaks, unordered lists and blockquotes.
You may use various keyboard selection features like End/Home/PageUp/PageDown/Left/Up/Right/Down, Ctrl+A/End/Home, Ctrl+Shift+End/Home/Left/Right, Shift+End/Home/PageUp/PageDown/Left/Up/Right/Down and so forth...
Supports direct Unicode character input using Ctrl+[NumPad].
All silverlight font formatting is supported and even some more like SUP/SUB formatting.
You may define macros and a proper object class that should replace matching text, like emoticons...
In contrast to many other rich text editors, this one is fully real-time. That means no preview is required because the editor allows editing all things directly.
If you only use macros and IRichTextObject to extend the control, you will automatically get support for secure content serialization of all control elements. Content serialization also supports to reload content and edit it again.
Secure content serialization gets rid of any potential security leak when storing user typed formatted text on a server and presenting it to visitors, because it is fully verifiable.
You may restrict font formatting to a well defined custom subset. This allows you to ensure that all user typed input matches your needs or website design. (this feature is currently not implemented, but only prototyped)
Snapshots allow convenient access to formatted content and also Find&Replace with regular expressions for example...

This is a compressed image of the Demo application, it looks much better in real-time ;-):

Updated Release: RichTextEdit Beta 2.0 (Jun 08, 2008)

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 15:57:13 GMT

*********************************************************************************************************************
I AM CURRENTLY SEARCHING FOR SOMEONE WHO WILL CONTINUE DEVELOPING THIS EDITOR, BECAUSE I DONT HAVE THE TIME TO ADD FURTHER IMPROVEMENTS!!!!
*********************************************************************************************************************

ATTENTION: This release is for Silverlight 2 Beta 2 only and won't work with Beta 1! I don't think that anyone will continue with Beta 1 but don't forget to download the latest silverlight development tools before you are trying to compile the source code or to display the demo!

Changes:

- Some weird fixes to support Silverlight 2 Beta 2...
- "RichTextEdit.Background" is no longer supported, use "RichTextEdit.BackgroundColor" instead... A transparent color value is not supported for background!
- I am also happy to announce that the control is much more stable than in the silverligth 2 beta 1 release...

TODO:

- An XAML style file to remove the TextBox border and cursor would allow to still support the "Background" property. Currently I am using a control to hide both and this is why it can't be transparent as well...
- Further performance improvements and better rendering... Wait for Silverlight 2 final to get those! Only god knows what will be changed till then and Microsoft will have to change a lot, again...

-------
You will find a comprehensive Demo Project in the package "Complete source code"...

- "Binary files" contains the final control DLL and a proper XML documentation
- "Complete source code" contains "Binary files" and all project files

Please note that the following files have not been changed since "RichTextEdit Beta 1.0" release:

- "Introduction" contains a brief overview about the component
- "Documentation" contains an extensive compiled HTML help file which refers to all public methods, classes and properties

New Post: Event when Vertical text overflows m_scroll Viewport

Skiazo — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 14:43:50 GMT

Your suggestion on using the sizechanged worked great!

As for re-parenting, I think that could easily qualify as one of the best ideas I have ever heard. That should simplify things a great deal.
I will give that a shot.

Thank you so much for your time and great suggestions!

New Post: Event when Vertical text overflows m_scroll Viewport

ChristophHusse — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:31:54 GMT

Puhh...

I Don't think it's the best idea to use multiple rich text edits to do this... Maybe you should think about letting Update() render the content to "m_Surface" and then just divide it into as much subsurfaces as you need (add the code directly after the last instruction in Update()). I am not really sure but as LineItems contains all the references and "m_Surface" is just a parent for displaying it should cause no trouble by re-parenting all childs in "m_Surface" to multiple surfaces on your cube according to their calculated location within the "m_Surface"...

New Post: Event when Vertical text overflows m_scroll Viewport

Skiazo — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 20:01:21 GMT

Thanks for your time Chris!

The Why:
I would like to be able to prevent vertical scrolling and, as an alternative, tile multiple RichTextEdits with subsets of text if the text passed in was too large to display in it's height. For an example perhaps have the RichTextEdit on the side of a cube and if the text overflows, create a new RichTextEdit and add it to a canvas on another side of a cube. I didn't think I would be able to tell how much the visual space the Serialized text would fill without actually letting the control apply the formatting first but perhaps there would be a way to tell prior to adding it to a RichTextEdit.

I want to say I checked the m_Scroll.ComputedVerticalScrollBarVisibility and it was true in all cases but I was checking in the other methods. I have not tried checking in the m_surface sizecahnged event though so that may be why. I will try your suggestions and let you know.

Thanks again!

Edit:
Just to clarify - in the cube example above the RichTextEdit would be ReadOnly and used to display what was serialized from a previous RichTextEdit that was stored in a database.

New Post: Event when Vertical text overflows m_scroll Viewport

ChristophHusse — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:54:04 GMT

Why would you need to do this?

Maybe you could intercept the SizeChanged event of "m_Surface" and compare the "m_Surface.ActualHeight" to the "m_Scroll.Height". In my opinion it should also be enough to just check the "m_Scroll.ComputedVerticalScrollBarVisibility" in the mentioned event...

regards
chris

New Post: Event when Vertical text overflows m_scroll Viewport

Skiazo — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 02:54:23 GMT

I have been trying to find a way to fire an event (custom event) when the vertical text flows past the m_scroll...., I think it is called a viewport. I stubbed out a new event and was all ready to go when I realized I have no idea how to determine if a "line" is past the normal viewport. I figured the best place to check would most likely be in the RichTextBox Update method or the InternalInsertString method. I tried checking visibility, m_Scroll.ComputedVerticalScrollBarVisibility, etc. and no property I could think of was giving me any love. Visual elements are a rather new concept to me as I have been stuck in blah HTML world for so long! Any suggestions on where and what properties I could check to determine that text has verticaly overlfowed would be a huge help.

Thank you for your time!

Closed Issue: Not Working with new Silverlight version 2.0.30523. BETA 2 ?????

ChristophHusse — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 13:23:11 GMT

I tried to run this demo, but it's asking me to unistall new version 2.0.30523 and install version 2.0.30226.
Not working with Silvelight 2 Beta 2?

New Post: Is it possible to save the rich text?

ChristophHusse — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 17:14:53 GMT

Just a hint, because many people are asking the same question...

Why do you want to use a format different to the internal binary one? You may use the readonly mode of the editor to display the text... If you store the text in a custom format you will loose editing capabilities and also it might be that you will run into security issues, because the format that the editor is using internally is verifiable. If you create your own format you have to verify all content yourself and this can be a burden...
In most cases it is just enough to use the readonly mode.

The only case where this approach isnt useful is if you want to export the content to a non-silverlight driven website. Even full-text search with SQL Server is still possible by simply extracting the plain text with "RichTextEdit.Snapshot" and storing it in a database. Instead the first case will at least require a serialization routine which you could build on top of XamlWriter (if yet available). But then you will also need silverlight to display it... Export to HTML would be worth a thought but also this brings serveral disadvantages, because you won't be able to serialize things like buttons and other interactive content supported by my component without much effort!

I just got another aspect... Of course the internal binary format won't be indexed by google... I don't know much abort Google's indexing mechanisms but maybe you could simply bypass this issue by adding the plain text in a hidden HTML-DIV container in the same HTML file that sets up the silverlight environment. This should be easily possible with ASP.NET for example... Even if I think that this could be a little bit tricky because Google may exclude hidden controls from being indexed.

Commented Issue: Not Working with new Silverlight version 2.0.30523. BETA 2 ?????

ChristophHusse — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 14:19:28 GMT

I tried to run this demo, but it's asking me to unistall new version 2.0.30523 and install version 2.0.30226.
Not working with Silvelight 2 Beta 2?
Comments: ** Comment from web user: ChristophHusse **

Depends on ^^

Commented Issue: Not Working with new Silverlight version 2.0.30523. BETA 2 ?????

ChristophHusse — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 14:13:34 GMT

Depends and what you have tried to do... The latest project release should work properly...

The live demo might not work with silverlight 2 beta 2 but I have no chance to update it.

Created Issue: Not Working with new Silverlight version 2.0.30523. BETA 2 ?????

kasim — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:20:54 GMT

I tried to run this demo, but it's asking me to unistall new version 2.0.30523 and install version 2.0.30226.
Not working with Silvelight 2 Beta 2?

New Post: Is it possible to save the rich text?

ChristophHusse — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:08:29 GMT

Thanks for your interest!

The first thing to mention is that you should use Silverlight 2 Beta 2 which is out now, because it bring extensive changes and will proably break your code developed in Beta 1... Also the r1.1 release of the editor misses some important fixed (especially in that area you are interested in: serialization) which are applied since r1.2... only r2.0 will have Silverlight 2 beta 2 support...

> For instant, I want to save a paragraph which includes mixing text and some textbox with text content in

This is of course possible and shown in the demo shipped with the RTE release... just click on "Insert Button" for example..

> (for example, saving to Xml) & load this paragraph into xaml page

Currently the editor does only support binary serialization, a custom format. Saving the content as XAML depends on the existence of XamlWriter, which was not included in silverlight 2 beta 1 and I don't know if it is in Beta 2.
Also it might cause some trouble and if you once saved the content to something other than the internal binary format you won't be able to edit it again or display it in the editor!

>but I'm not sure the SnapShot class can help...

No the snapshot will only support binary serialization....

>Could you please give me some directions to archive this?

The only thing you can do right now is to look at the implementation of the binary serialization. If you are a little bit familiar with Silverlight and XAML you should have no major problems to write a custom XAML serializer and you would be welcome to publish it here if it works ;-)... Just look at "Snapshot.Serialize()"; I think all you have to do is to loop through the LineItems-Enumeration as shown in the binary serialization and instead of using it, just provide your own implementation using an XamlWriter to serialize each single LineItem...

I hope this helps... If you have further problems don't hestitate to ask ;-)

regards
chris

New Post: Is it possible to save the rich text?

vietdo — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 08:22:07 GMT

Hello,
I'm looking for a rich text editor for Silverlight. I want to thank you for your awesome rich editor. It's really the one I need.

I'm using Silverlight 2 Beta 1. I downloaded your editor project (r1.1) and I'm looking for a way to save and load the content of the rich text.
For instant, I want to save a paragraph which includes mixing text and some textbox with text content in (for example, saving to Xml) & load this paragraph into xaml page.
Is it possible to do that? Could you please give me some directions to archive this?

I'm looking in the documentation but I'm not sure the SnapShot class can help...

Thank you.

UPDATED RELEASE: RichTextEdit Beta 2.0 (Jun 08, 2008)

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 08:00:49 GMT

ATTENTION: This release is for Silverlight 2 Beta 2 only and won't work with Beta 1! I don't think that anyone will continue with Beta 1 but don't forget to download the latest silverlight development tools before you are trying to compile the source code or to display the demo!

Changes:

- Some weird fixes to support Silverlight 2 Beta 2...
- "RichTextEdit.Background" is no longer supported, use "RichTextEdit.BackgroundColor" instead... A transparent color value is not supported for background!
- I am also happy to announce that the control is much more stable than in the silverligth 2 beta 1 release...

TODO:

- An XAML style file to remove the TextBox border and cursor would allow to still support the "Background" property. Currently I am using a control to hide both and this is why it can't be transparent as well...
- Further performance improvements and better rendering... Wait for Silverlight 2 final to get those! Only god knows what will be changed till then and Microsoft will have to change a lot, again...

-------
You will find a comprehensive Demo Project in the package "Complete source code"...

- "Binary files" contains the final control DLL and a proper XML documentation
- "Complete source code" contains "Binary files" and all project files

Please note that the following files have not been changed since "RichTextEdit Beta 1.0" release:

- "Introduction" contains a brief overview about the component
- "Documentation" contains an extensive compiled HTML help file which refers to all public methods, classes and properties

UPDATED RELEASE: RichTextEdit Beta 2.0 (Jun 08, 2008)

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 10:38:50 GMT

Changes:

- Some weird fixes to support Silverlight 2 Beta 2...
- "RichTextEdit.Background" is no longer supported, use "RichTextEdit.BackgroundColor" instead... A transparent color value is not supported for background!
- I am also happy to announce that the control is much more stable than in the silverligth 2 beta 1 release...

TODO:

- An XAML style file to remove the TextBox border and cursor would allow to still support the "Background" property. Currently I am using a control to hide both and this is why it can't be transparent as well...
- Further performance improvements and better rendering... Wait for Silverlight 2 final to get those! Only god knows what will be changed till then and Microsoft will have to change a lot, again...

-------
You will find a comprehensive Demo Project in the package "Complete source code"...

- "Binary files" contains the final control DLL and a proper XML documentation
- "Complete source code" contains "Binary files" and all project files

Please note that the following files have not been changed since "RichTextEdit Beta 1.0" release:

- "Introduction" contains a brief overview about the component
- "Documentation" contains an extensive compiled HTML help file which refers to all public methods, classes and properties

UPDATED RELEASE: RichTextEdit Beta 2.0 (Jun 08, 2008)

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 10:38:08 GMT

Changes:

- Some weird fixes to support Silverlight 2 Beta 2...
- "RichTextEdit.Background" is no longer supported, use "RichTextEdit.BackgroundColor" instead... A transparent color value is also not supported for background!
- I am also happy to announce that the control is much more stable than in the silverligth 2 beta 1 release...

TODO:

- An XAML style file to remove the TextBox border and cursor would allow to still support the "Background" property. Currently I am using a control to hide both and this is why it can't be transparent as well...
- Further performance improvements and better rendering... Wait for Silverlight 2 final to get those! Only god knows what will be changed till then and Microsoft will have to change a lot, again...

-------
You will find a comprehensive Demo Project in the package "Complete source code"...

- "Binary files" contains the final control DLL and a proper XML documentation
- "Complete source code" contains "Binary files" and all project files

Please note that the following files have not been changed since "RichTextEdit Beta 1.0" release:

- "Introduction" contains a brief overview about the component
- "Documentation" contains an extensive compiled HTML help file which refers to all public methods, classes and properties

UPDATED RELEASE: RichTextEdit Beta 2.0

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 10:37:47 GMT

Changes:

- Some weird fixes to support Silverlight 2 Beta 2...
- "RichTextEdit.Background" is no longer supported, use "RichTextEdit.BackgroundColor" instead... A transparent color value is also not supported for background!
- I am also happy to announce that the control is much more stable than in the silverligth 2 beta 1 release...

TODO:

- An XAML style file to remove the TextBox border and cursor would allow to still support the "Background" property. Currently I am using a control to hide both and this is why it can't be transparent as well...
- Further performance improvements and better rendering... Wait for Silverlight 2 final to get those! Only god knows what will be changed till then and Microsoft will have to change a lot, again...

-------
You will find a comprehensive Demo Project in the package "Complete source code"...

- "Binary files" contains the final control DLL and a proper XML documentation
- "Complete source code" contains "Binary files" and all project files

Please note that the following files have not been changed since "RichTextEdit Beta 1.0" release:

- "Introduction" contains a brief overview about the component
- "Documentation" contains an extensive compiled HTML help file which refers to all public methods, classes and properties