Building a Rich Text editor for an RCP based application

2009-03-10 21:43 by Jon Buck (11 comments)

Firstly a disclaimer, this entry is not intended to be a detailed "how to", if anyone expresses an interest I can provide the source code for the project and perhaps accompany it with a more intimate version but for now this is just a general overview. Recently I found myself needing a Rich Text Editor for an RCP based application I am working on. My first thoughts were that this should be a no brainer and that I surely couldn't be the first person looking for this type of widget, however after scouring the SWT site there didn't seem to be a widget that fitted the bill off the shelf and after much searching I couldn't find any significant threads nor any satisfactory solutions. The SWT site does provide an example of a rich text editor based on the Styled Text widget however the one thing the examples don't seem to include is how to persist or load the text and style information which of course is pretty important for a workable solution. I really wanted a pure SWT solution as I wanted it to be as native looking as possible so I messed around with the styled text widget example for a fair while however I couldn't work out how to easily or cleanly deal with the text and style information therefore I ended up looking for an alternative.

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