Text classes

[John-Val Rose]

+1

A full-featured API to enable rich text and syntax highlighting in editors is *very* much needed.  All the attempts I have seen at creating such editors with JavaFX are basically  “fudges”.

I have never seen HTMLEditor used in a real-world application.

> On 26 Nov 2017, at 10:40, 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.