Feature from 7.2 (January/February 2009)

Postmortem: FTC

Building the Formatted Text Control

Issue: 7.2 (January/February 2009)
Author: Brendan Murphy
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 23,541
Starting Page Number: 13
RBD Number: 7208
Resource File(s): None
Related Web Link(s):

Known Limitations: None

Excerpt of article text...

The Formatted Text Control (FTC) is a WYSIWYG word processor control. The FTC was designed from the ground up to be a word processor as opposed to a text editor with other capabilities added to it like picture support. This is important distinction because trying to add word processor capabilities to something that starts out as a plain text editor is asking for trouble. To add these capabilities down the road I would have to constantly rewrite the core code. So I decided to go for a complete solution from the beginning because I knew it would be a lot easier create a plain text editor from something that exceeded the requirements than trying to build a word processor upon a text editor. The FTC is word processor that can be reconfigured to act like an EditField and everything in between. The FTC supports three different modes of display; page, normal, and edit. Page mode is like what you see in a true WYSIWYG editor like Apple Pages. Normal mode is like Microsoft's Word normal mode. Edit mode is like an EditField on steroids. It also has RTF support, paragraph and character styles, picture and custom object support, undo management, and many customization options for adapting it to your application. The FTC is a professional solution for adding word processing to your REALbasic (RB) application.

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Postmortem: FTC

Building the Formatted Text Control