Text classes

[Phil Race]

This is a gap it would be nice to fill.
Since it is not a small effort to do right there'd be a design side as 
well as implementation so it can't be just 'slid in'.
And I don't think just moving internal APIs to public is the way to 
approach it.
There are no current plans to allocate Oracle resources to do that work.
But this is an open source project, so if someone on this list is 
willing to design & contribute it - and of course
fix the issues and long term maintain it - then that would be great.


-phil.

On 11/25/2017 03:40 PM, javafx at use.startmail.com wrote:
> Hi, This is a question about the future of Text under Javafx.
>
> Very briefly, Swing provided access to everything a dev could need in 
> order to write a rich text editor from scratch. LineBreakMeasurers and 
> HitTesting and everything.
>
> In JavaFX these things are not directly available to the dev and 
> anyway, to the extent that they are, they cannot be used to write a 
> rich text editor..
>
> There are many classes needed involving the measuring of glyphs and 
> text lines etc etc etc which would be needed for anyone who wanted to 
> write their own rich text editor. They exist, but are under sun.com 
> and given the modularization of Java 9 are truly inaccessible to 
> developers.
>
> I am aware of the existing Javafx controls. I am also aware of the 
> efforts available at GitHub and elsewhere to create a rich text editor 
> and all of them without exception are handicapped by this same lack of 
> API.
>
> I am also aware of HTMLEditor in JavaFX but that 1) commits the dev to 
> WebRenderer and 2) still doesn't provide access to the needed classes 
> and methods. It's not sufficient to suppose that HTML 5 or whatever 
> follows is the answer to all text layout challenges.
>
> Formerly, Swing had all these missing features available as API and 
> many good text editors were created using those APIs.
>
> For the sake of future planning, we really need to know- is there any 
> recognition within Oracle that this is something which has to be 
> addressed? Is it on any hypothetical roadmap?  Or is HTMLEditor as 
> much as JavaFX is going to provide ?
>
> Thank you.