Hello,
having used QtQuick professionally for serveral years now, I have some
suggestions regarding the text handling in Qt Quick.
One major point of interest for me is rich text handling. A large number of
modern (mostly HTML/Electron-based) applications nowadays feature smart text
input fields which are able to automatically highlight or link certain parts of
the text and show buttons, tags, emojis or similar controls inlined in the
text. These kinds of controls get more and more important in UI development.
As of yet, QtQuick lacks such a feature. Anything going beyond very basic
hyperlink/image support requires developers to resort to the RichText mode
which however only allows you to use a subset of HTML rather than your own
QtQuick Controls which has a bad performance impact and requires more
development effort.
I would like propose a new layout control in QML for positioning an arbitrary
composition of text and other QtQuick elements. It should support user
selection and user editing (similar to contenteditable=true in HTML) and let
the QML elements inside the text react to them being selected.
The syntax I have in mind could look like this:
TextLayout {
alignment: Qt.AlignLeft
editable: true
selectionAllowed: true
TextSpan {
text: "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet"
}
Button {
label: "Click me"
TextLayout.alignment: TextLayout.Center
background: TextLayout.isSelected ? "blue" : "white"
}
TextSpan {
text: "Text after the button"
TextLayout.allowSelection: false
}
TextSpan {
lineBreakBefore: true
color: "red"
text: "more text"
}
}
This is inspired by the TextSpan and WidgetSpan controls in Flutter:
https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/widgets/WidgetSpan-class.html
https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/painting/TextSpan-class.html
The second proposal I would like to make affects custom QtQuick controls
developed in C++. As of now, it is practically impossible to implement custom
scene graph controls (not QQuickPaintedItems) containing text without using the
private QQuickTextNode. This node should be made public, or different APIs for
painting text via the scene graph should be exposed.
Are there already plans to include such features for Qt6 in the near future?
Best regards,
Steven_______________________________________________
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