# cwac-richedit **Repository Path**: mirrors_Asana/cwac-richedit ## Basic Information - **Project Name**: cwac-richedit - **Description**: CWAC RichEditText component - **Primary Language**: Unknown - **License**: Apache-2.0 - **Default Branch**: master - **Homepage**: None - **GVP Project**: No ## Statistics - **Stars**: 0 - **Forks**: 0 - **Created**: 2021-05-26 - **Last Updated**: 2026-01-04 ## Categories & Tags **Categories**: Uncategorized **Tags**: None ## README CWAC RichEditText: Letting Users Make Text Pretty ================================================= **UPDATE: This project is discontinued. This repo will be taken private on or after 12/1/2021** Android's `EditText` widget supports formatted (a.k.a., "rich text") editing. It just lacks any way for the user to supply formatting, and it does not provide much in the way of convenience methods for a developer to, say, tie in some sort of toolbar to allow users to format selections. That's where `RichEditText` comes in. `RichEditText` is a drop-in replacement for `EditText` that: - Provides an action mode on Android 4.0+ that allows users to format selected pieces of text - Provides convenience methods to allow developers to trigger formatting for selected text via other means This widget is packaged as an Android Studio library module, with a `demo/` subdirectory containing a regular Android Studio app module with a couple of activities demonstrating the use of `RichEditText`. This library also contains a series of utility classes for working with rich text. In particular, it has code to convert a `Spanned` to and from XHTML, as an alternative to the `toHtml()` and `fromHtml()` methods on Android's `Html` class. In addition to the documentation on this page, partial JavaDocs are also available for [the editor widget](http://javadocs.commonsware.com/cwac/richedit/index.html) and [the utility classes](http://javadocs.commonsware.com/cwac/richtextutils/index.html). This Android library project is available as an artifact for use with Gradle. To use that, add the following blocks to your `build.gradle` file: ```groovy repositories { maven { url "https://s3.amazonaws.com/repo.commonsware.com" } } dependencies { compile 'com.commonsware.cwac:richedit:0.5.3' } ``` Or, if you cannot use SSL, use `http://repo.commonsware.com` for the repository URL. If you are not using Gradle, download or clone this repo, and add the `richedit/` module to your Android Studio project as a library module. **NOTE**: This project is no longer compatible with Eclipse at the source level, as of version 0.5.0. A ZIP file containing what should be an Eclipse-compatible project is in [the releases area](https://github.com/commonsguy/cwac-richedit/releases). However, this ZIP file has not been tested — please file bug reports if you encounter problems with it. **NOTE**: If you were using v0.2.0 with ActionBarSherlock, ActionBarSherlock support was removed from this project as of v0.3.0. Please remain on v0.2.0, or switch to the native API Level 11+ action bar (a.k.a., "15 is the new 10"). Usage: RichEditText ----- Simply add `com.commonsware.cwac.richedit.RichEditText` widgets to your layout as needed: ```xml ``` At this time, there are no custom attributes used by `RichEditText`. On its own, by default, `RichEditText` provides one means of users applying formatting: the standard `-` for bold, `-` for italics, and `-` for underline work if there is a selection. You can disable this by calling `setKeyboardShortcutsEnabled(false)`. If you want an on-screen UI for formatting, you have two choices. First, you can call `enableActionModes()` on the `RichEditText`. This will add a "FORMAT" entry on the action mode that comes up when the user highlights some prose in the editor. Tapping that will allow the user to toggle various effects. The action modes work so-so on phones at this time — tablets work better. To get it to work on phones at all, you will need to include `android:imeOptions="flagNoExtractUi"` as an attribute on the `RichEditText`. **NOTE**: The action modes do not work on Android 5.1 and higher. They will be deprecated in an upcoming release of this library and will be removed entirely before the library reaches 1.0. A stock toolbar implementation will be provided instead as the out-of-the-box way to offer users the ability to control effects. Alternatively, you can have your own toolbar or gesture interface or whatever to allow users to format text. In that case, here are the two key methods to call on `RichEditText`: - `applyEffect()` changes the current selection, applying or removing an effect (e.g., making the selection bold). The first parameter is the effect to apply (e.g., `RichEditText.BOLD`). The second parameter is the new value for the effect. Many effects take boolean values, so `applyEffect(RichEditText.BOLD, true)` would format the current selection as bold. - `setOnSelectionChangedListener()` is where you register a `RichEditText.OnSelectionChangedListener` object, which will be called with `onSelectionChanged()` whenever the user changes the selection in the widget (i.e., highlights text or taps to un-select the highlight). You are provided the start and end positions of the selection (as were supplied to `onSelectionChanged()` to `RichEditText` itself by Android), plus a list of effects that are active on that selection. This will allow you to update your toolbar to indicate what is and is not in use, and so you know what to do when the user taps on one of those toolbar buttons again. ### Supported Effects At the time of this writing, here are the `RichEditText` static data members for each supported effect: - `BOLD` - `ITALIC` - `UNDERLINE` - `STRIKETHROUGH` - `SUPERSCRIPT` - `SUBSCRIPT` - `TYPEFACE` - `ABSOLUTE_SIZE` - `RELATIVE_SIZE` - `URL` - `BACKGROUND` (color) - `FOREGROUND` (color) There are other effects presently implemented, but they will be revised shortly, including name and data type changes, so don't mess with them yet. To use the `BACKGROUND` and `FOREGROUND` effects, you will need to call `setColorPicker()` on the `RichEditText` widget, supplying an implementation of the `ColorPicker` interface. That has one required method: `pick()`. It receives a `ColorPickerOperation`, on which you can call `hasColor()` (returns `true` if we are editing an existing color) and `getColor()` (returns the existing color value, if applicable). Your job is to collect a color from the user, then call either `onColorPicked()` (supplying the color) or `onPickerDismissed()` (indicating that the user abandoned the request for a color and that the selection should remain unchanged). See the demo app for an example implementation. Known Limitations: RichEditText ----------------- - This widget has not been tested with the AppCompat action bar backport. Most likely, it will not work well. AppCompat support is planned, at least to get a `Toolbar` implementation going. Tint support will be added as well, if and only if the process for doing so is documented. - The `demo` app uses a `ColorMixerActivity` from the [CWAC-ColorMixer library](https://github.com/commonsguy/cwac-colormixer) for its implementation of `ColorPicker`. While easy to integrate, this approach has one major flaw: the color picker remains in the foreground after a configuration change. Since the demo activity is recreated, so its its `RichEditText` widget, and any existing selection (or `ColorPickerOperation`) is lost. What the demo app *should* do is dismiss the color picker on a configuration change, since the chosen color will not be applied anyway. Usage: XHTML Conversion ---------------- This library also contains classes to convert `Spanned` objects to/from XHTML. ### Scope of Support The primary objective of this conversion logic is to support the formatting offered by the `RichEditText` widget. Apps that wish to allow users to enter in rich text can use `RichEditText`, then persist the `Spanned` using this library. Later on, if the user wants to edit rich text entered previously, the app can convert the XHTML back into a `Spanned` to supply to `RichEditText`. A secondary objective is to allow the resulting persisted value to be usable by anything that needs an XHTML representation of rich text. For example, you might supply the XHTML to a Web service, or upload it to a Web site. That's why XHTML is chosen as the representation format, as opposed to some sort of `Serializable` or other binary packaging. Whereas `Html.fromHtml()` is designed to parse semi-arbitrary HTML, this library is not. You are welcome to feed it XHTML from wherever and see if it works. As the saying goes, YMMV. ### Basic Parsing and Generating Given a `Spanned` (e.g., `getText()` on a `RichEditText`), to get an XHTML representation of the `Spanned`, create an instance of `SpannedXhtmlGenerator` and call `toXhtml()` on it. This will return a `String` of XHTML. Later on, to get the `Spanned` back from that XHTML, create an instance of a `SpannableStringGenerator` and call `fromXhtml()` on it, passing it the `String` of XHTML, and getting back a a `Spannable` that you can use with `RichEditText` or whatever. And that's pretty much it. ### Conversion Rules A stock set of rules, embodied in a collection of `SpanTagHandler` instances, are applied to convert the `Spanned` to XHTML and back again: | `CharacterStyle` | XHTML Tag Structure | | --------------------- | --------------------------------------- | | `AbsoluteSizeSpan` | `` | | `BackgroundColorSpan` | `` | | `BulletSpan` | `
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