High performance text component

[Richard Bair]

Either, both, and neither ;-)

The rich text support that Felipe is targeting is two-fold: a new Parent node (possibly extending from Region) which would take Text nodes as well as ImageViews, MediaViews, Buttons, Tables, etc, and lay them all out. For runs of Text nodes of different styles, it would lay them all out such that bidi, complex text, etc all work correctly. So basically, a programmatic way to lay out text, and to be able to flow any other Node with the Text (as any good rich text layout engine would do).

In addition, we want to add the ability to display rich text to Labeled UI controls, such as Label, Button, Cell, etc. For these, we feed it a textual string (as we do today) but it ends up being parsed and turned into Div / Text rich text Nodes. Much like feeding HTML to a Node in DOM would create additional DOM nodes.

So you could use this layout as a flow based layout for constructing your UI -- which might make sense in some document heavy scenarios. However it doesn't have the full box model (some partial support maybe such as padding etc, but no float). It could be used as the basis for a Rich Text Editor -- I'd probably use a specialized ListView to virtualize rows of RichText paragraphs (such that each cell is a Paragraph/Div thing). That would make for a blistering fast editor, with full rich text, line wrapping, etc almost for free (you have to handle the keystrokes and such, and not to discount that, but the rest of it would "just work", assuming we expose selection API and hit testing).

You could use it for adding rich text to cells in a ListView without having to write a fully custom cell factory. Just feed the cell some rich text string which gets turned into nodes and off you go.

Richard

On Aug 30, 2012, at 4:04 PM, Daniel Zwolenski wrote:

> I'm a bit confused, are we still talking about a rich text editor here or a whole new way to build scenes?
> 
> 
> On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 8:38 AM, Felipe Heidrich <felipe.heidrich at oracle.com> wrote:
> Not sure,
> 
> CSS has the overflow property (visible | hidden | scroll) that specifies what would happen in this case.
> 
> Do we have this concept in JFX ?
> 
> What happen if I place a Rect(10, 10, 100, 100) in a Region that is (50, 50) ? it overflows right ?
> 
> Felipe
> 
> On Aug 30, 2012, at 3:16 PM, Richard Bair wrote:
> 
> >>> Extending region to get CSS is a good thing, but Region has width / height and is resizable. We could move CSS support up to Parent, or make sense of DIV having a specific width and height (width is useful because we then wouldn't need "wrappingWidth" -- ie, they are the same thing, and it would be resizable so adding it to a layout container would perfect. But what to do about the height? If the height isn't right, do we just flow the text beyond the given height? Kind of a weird case). Or we can add CSS Background / Border support to TextFlow independent of the Region.
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >> I thought about this a little bit yesterday, if we choose to make Div a subclass of Region we would probably remove setWrappingWidth(double) and add:
> >> setWrapMode (none | word | character) or use CSS names (word-break, word-wrap).
> >>
> >> As for the relationship between the width and height, the way I thought, if word wrap is requested then content bias is set to horizontal, otherwise is null.
> >>
> >> Does that make any sense ?
> >> as I said,  I didn't think about this very much…
> >
> > But what should we do if the region's width/height is set so small that we can't show all the text. Do we clip, or let it run over?
> >
> > Richard
> 
>