Formatted Text Control 3.1

StyledText in Xojo can be a royal pain - especially in Cocoa builds. The fact that it doesn’t support many rtf standards (like inline graphics and hyperlink text to name a few) make it less than desirable for many developers. This is where the Formatted Text Control comes in for many. It’s a canvas subclass control that is a Word Processor and reads/writes/supports more of the RTF standard than the TextArea control. Unfortunately, when building for Cocoa, we lost much of the text handling we came to know and expect in Carbon applications. This meant that international languages weren’t fully supported in Cocoa.

This week Xojo released the Text Input Canvas plugin (see the links in my blog post) that allows the Canvas control to receive the proper text events to work. The Text Input plugin is a Xojo-only, open-source plugin that works in Cocoa, Windows, and Linux.

Version 3.1 of the Formatted Text Control takes advantage of the plugin thus bringing it up to speed in Cocoa. I believe it’s also the first commercial application to take advantage of this technology outside of the IDE itself (since the Code Editor is a Canvas subclass). We’ve released version 3.1 as an alpha so all version 3 owners can start integrating it into their Cocoa applications.

3.1 is a free upgrade to all version 3 owners and is a paid upgrade for all previous versions. Note that 3.1 is NOT backwards compatible with Real Studio.

More info at http://www.bkeeneybriefs.com/2013/06/formatted-text-control-3-1-0-alpha-1/