TRichEdit has/had 3 basic problems:

(1) Borland never supported Rich Edit 2 (RICHED20.DLL), only the original Rich 
Edit 1 (RICHED32.DLL). Rich Edit 2 has been part of Windows since the late 90's 
but Borland never supported it, not even in Delphi 2006.

(2) Microsoft never fixed the bugs in RICHED20.DLL and doesn't appear to have 
made any improvements to it in years.

(3) Even RICHED20.DLL only supports a fairly limited set of RTF control words.

By hacking Delphi's ComCtrls.pas it is possible to enable support for 
RICHED20.DLL in TRichEdit, although this doesn't solve (2) or (3).

Any Rich Edit control built from scratch would have the same problem of (3), 
that is, what subset of RTF to support? One problem with a control like this is 
that people want to use it like a word processor, which it's not. One person's 
useful control word is the next person's useless baggage.

Ideally you could wrap a smallish word processor like AbiWord and use it in 
Lazarus. Then you would automatically have support for most of the RTF spec.

Note that OS X has its own Help Viewer, so a Rich Edit control wouldn't be 
useful for viewing help on Macs, except in a non-standard way.



-----Original Message-----
From: Graeme Geldenhuys [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2007 4:55 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [lazarus] Doing the Delphi 6 Text Editor Tutorial in Lazarus?

On 4/5/07, Hess, Philip J <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Do you want to (a) create RTF files programmatically and/or display RTF files 
> from your program or do you want to (b) allow your users to have a simple 
> rich-text editor in your program. You can do (a) now in a cross-platform way 
> with the FPC rtfpars unit and an external word processor.
>

At one stage (long ago when I worked with Kylix) I needed something
like (b). A richtext component, but have no need for it in my current
projects.

Though I can see some uses for it in Lazarus.

  * Editing FPDoc documentation using 'lazde' and having a richedit
component for the descriptions would be nice.  The richedit component
could have a swapable backend for saving to different formats like the
xml needed in the documentation.  No need for anybody wanting to
create documentation to learn the fpdoc formatting tags.  Just type,
highlight text and click whatever formatting you want to apply (like
all other word processors).
  * Help Viewer for when Lazarus one day has a cross platform help
file (like .chm or .hlp).

You get the idea...


-- 
Graeme Geldenhuys

There's no place like S34° 03.168'  E018° 49.342'

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