Our team decided that we need our own custom Rich text box control for Silverlight app we are developing. We looked at existing controls mentioned at A good rich text control for Silverlight
but decided to build our own,due to varios reasons. We are planning to build it in stages, with elementary functionality in 1st stage which mainly includes text formatting. There are very big differences in our team on its estimate, as we don't have prior experience on wpf or silverlight technology.
Can you please help with guesstimates on how long it might take to build such a control, e.g. with the functionality provided by vectorlight or ComponentOne's rich text controls?
EDIT: To make question less vague:)- in 1st stage we plan to mainly add - text editing, styling, formatting, text flow, undo-redo, columns, lists.
A really long time. Building a fully-featured text edit control is one of those things like writing your own build system, that might look simple but is in fact extremely difficult, when you get into internationalization.
It may be quicker to wait and use Silverlight 4 and its Rich Text Control, it supports most of the common Rich Text functions - and supports control hosting so would allow some custom additions it if needed.
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I'm looking for a rich text box for a winform application. C#, .net 4.0
I need support for Bold, Underline, bullets and numbering in the text box.
In the future, to add language support with spelling correction is a wish.
I need this to work with ITextSharp for report generation.
I'd appreciate input on which choise of controls that would best suit my needs.
I've previously used on various projects RadControls, Infragistics and iTextSharp but not DevExpress so I can't speak to DevExpress. That being said, for the kinds of rich text editing you are describing, I think you can safely go with any of the 3. If it were up to me, I would go with Infragistics though.
I guess it's a matter of personal preference in this case but I've always found Infragistics to be easier to use than RadControls. I've also found Infragistics' documentation to be better (from the standpoint of ease of locating what I was looking for) than that of RadControls. Both Infragistics and Telerik (RadControls) support teams/communities were very active and helpful whenever I needed help.
Like I said, I can't speak to DevExpress but I would imagine it'll be very comparable to the other two in this context. If you have any specific questions about Infragistics and RadTools, feel free to ask. I'd be happy to answer them.
From your question i was not able to deduce which form of Windows Application are you talking about. Because as you know we can develop windows based application on .NET using Windows Presentation Foundation or traditionally known WinForms development. I cant speak for others but certianly can point you to 2 flavours available from Telerik for Windows Application Development. They are:
RadControls for WinForms - RadRichTextBox:
Features:
Rich Text Formatting - Telerik RadRichTextBox control allows you to
edit text and apply rich formatting options, like:
Bold
Italic
Underline
Strike Through
Text color and background
Bullet and numbered lists
Paragraph alignment and indentation
Show/Hide formatting symbols
Clear Formatting
Superscript and Subscript
Inserting pictures/symbol
SpellChecker - extensible spell checking for different languages,
using built-in or custom dictionaries.
Multi-level Undo/Redo Support - Telerik RadRichTextBox provides
desktop-like usability and control thanks to its multilevel
Undo/Redo feature. It allows past actions to be reviewed and
reversed, just like in Microsoft Word.
Two types of layout – Paged and Flow (as text in an HTML page viewed
in a browser).
Multi-region selection - the built-in multi-region support enables
you to perform various operations for more than one selection
simultaneously.
Import/export - with Telerik RadRichTextBox control you can load
XAML, HTML, RTF, DocX (rich-text) or TXT (plain text) into the
control, you can format and edit it and then export it back to any
of the above formats or PDF.
More information on this can be found at: http://www.telerik.com/products/winforms.aspx
Documentation for RichTextBox for WinForms can be found at: http://www.telerik.com/help/winforms/richtextbox-overview.html
RadControls for WPF - RadRichTextBox:
Features:
Rich Text Formatting - Telerik RadRichTextBox control allows you to
edit text and apply rich formatting options, like:
Bold,
Italic
Underline,
Strike Through, Superscript and Subscript
Usage of all available system fonts
Text color and background
Bullet and numbered lists
Paragraph alignment and indentation
Show/Hide formatting symbols
Clear Formatting
Inserting pictures/symbols/hyperlinks/custom UI elements
Table support – including nested tables, merging cells, setting
different RowSpan and ColumnSpan, tables with auto width and more.
ContextMenu - a standard one is provided out of the box, but it can
be easily customized or substituted for a user-defined one.
SelectionMiniToolbar - very similar to the one in MS Word, but can
also be replaced with another.
SpellChecker - extensible spell checking for different languages,
using built-in or custom dictionaries.
Printing – Using the native printing implementation of WPF.
Multi-level Undo/Redo Support - Telerik RadRichTextBox provides
desktop-like usability and control thanks to its multilevel
Undo/Redo feature. It allows past actions to be reviewed and
reversed, just like in Microsoft Word.
Two types of layout – Paged and Flow (as text in an HTML page viewed
in a browser).
Multi-region selection - the built-in multi-region support enables
you to perform various operations for more than one selection
simultaneously.
Rich-text clipboard – allows rich text copy/paste from Word,
OpenOffice etc.; Import/export - with Telerik RadRichTextBox
control you can load XAML, HTML, RTF, DocX (rich-text) or TXT
(plain text) into the control, you can format and edit it and then
export it back to any of the above formats or PDF.
More information can be read at : http://www.telerik.com/products/wpf/overview.aspx
Here is the documentation of RichTextBox : http://www.telerik.com/help/wpf/radrichtextbox-overview.html
Hope with above information you are able to visualize the gamut of options our control provides.
Lohith (Tech Evangelist, Telerik India)
Is there any editor control in Silverlight 4?
I just want the basic functionality; much what Stackoverflow has while posting question. The basic stuff like making it bold, italic, etc. I saw Telerik's editor control. However, I'd rather not use it because it is a very large assembly of 1 MB. After already adding a few of Telerik's assemblies, my XAP size is above 2 MB.
Have you considered just using code around the built in RichTextBox?
Download sample from the MSDN documentation at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff426926(v=VS.95).aspx.
Something to consider though is what ultimately you want to do this this Rich text? The built in control use Xaml to describe the rich text which isn't much use to you if ultimately you need to expose it in an email.
Is there a way to download more controls or anything, because I have seen a few things in other programs I don't think I've seen in the toolbox. Can you download new ones, or did the company somehow custom make a control? If it was custom made, are there any tutorials I can take a look at that tell how to make your own?
Some companies make third party controls for Winforms - Telerik is one I know of.
Personally, I prefer to make my own controls based on the existing WinForms ones, as I have more control over them - this prevents my products from having bugs which just can't be fixed. I can also tweak the controls to do exactly what I need, rather than choosing a closest match. Building custom controls is relatively easy if you have the experience.
There is a basic tutorial on CodeProject which shows how to create a fancy Button. After that you should be able to figure out how to customize more complex controls.
Side-note:
While it's reasonably easy to develop custom controls in WinForms if you have the time to practice, WPF is a much better framework for building custom controls. WPF controls are designed specifically for customization, so there is a lot more flexibility.
SL4 now contains a Microsoft implementation of a RichTextBox. This is awesome but doesn't support bullets, numbering, super script or subscript.
There are also a bunch of other RichTextBox implementations out there from the control providers.
When is the best time to use the Microsoft one and when should I go to the market? What is the best control for the different use cases for a Rich Text control?
BTW, I'm not looking for subjective stuff. I'm interested in functionality, performance, extensibility, download size etc
performance? Forget about Microsoft`s RichTextBox. The WPF RichTextBox is a speed mess because its a FlowDocument. Silverlight is not different.
I`m working in a serial terminal project developed in VB.NET.
I need to display a lot of formatted (color, font styles) text data in a read-only control (the incoming serial data).
I don`t know if it's a good idea to use richtext control or a grid, or there's a better third party control?
Thanks
I've used Scintilla.NET for this sort of thing before: http://scintillanet.codeplex.com/
It's designed for use in text editors, but it can be made read-only, and it's pretty quick even for large quantities of text. You get efficient per-character control over colours and basic text styling, though not to the same extent as the Rich Edit control.
Negative points are that it's based on a control designed for use from C++ code, so there's not much in the way of .NET-specific documentation. And the .NET code is in C#, so it's probably best if you have a passing familiarity with that.
I think the RichTextBox would be a good place to start since it's included and then you could upgrade to a 3rd party control if you hit any limitations (I'm assuming that cost is important).
Please note though that it can be a bit slow at colouring text depending on the method used. This article shows a supposedly (I haven't tried it) faster way of doing it:
http://codebetter.com/blogs/patricksmacchia/archive/2008/07/07/some-richtextbox-tricks.aspx