Rich Text Editor in Tour de Flex
I was browsing using the Tour de Flex application and found a sample of what looked like a rich text editor. Have any of you noticed the Working With the File System showcased in Tour de Flex? You can find it under AIR Capabilities -> Coding Techniques.
It is a rich text editor. It allows one to change fonts, font sizes, colors, bold, italicize, underline, indent, and insert links into the text. The file can be saved and only files with an extension of .TXT, .HTM and .HTML can be opened using it.
The app doesn’t parse all HTML files properly and the files created using it do not have the HTML syntax, but something called TEXTFORMAT which is very similar.
I am clueless about what it exactly is because it is named Working With the File System. All help is appreciated.
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this is the built-in rich text editor:
this is the standard Flex RTE. TEXTFORMAT is a normal HTML tag that is utilized by the RTE in Flex to format the text using the available subset of HTML. This example is simply to show the file IO capabilities of an AIR application.
this is the standard flex component “RichtTextEditor”
RichTextEditor is a built in Flex component. It does not dictate what you do with the HTML-like code it creates. In that example it may be saving to a file, but you can use it for whatever you want. I have used it in a few apps to allow users to edit some text which is saved to a database and then shown in other parts of the application.
It’s under “Working With the File System” because that’s one of the relatively new features and a prominent AIR one.
The RichTextEditor itself was already part of the Flex 2 SDK… See http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/2/langref/mx/controls/RichTextEditor.html
And about the TEXTFORMAT thingy, I remember having played with it back in the Flash 6 days, at least in late 2002! It was initially meant to persist some TextField settings from the Flash IDE (indent, tabs…) outside the small subset of HTML tags supported.
For a really more impressive impersonation of a rich editor, leveraging the latest features of Flash Player 10, just have a look at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/textlayout/demos/ I really believe this should be part of Tour de Flex through FP10 support in AIR 1.5!
I think it’s purpose is to demonstrate AIR’s file saving capabilities. Tour de
Flex’s other purpose is not just as an explorer but a an open source project to
learn how these things are done. Using the Eclipse plugin, you can very easily
browse through the code and can look up to see how that section was built to
understand more about “Working With the File System”.
(I love that name, BTW, reminds of ‘Tour de France,’ as if I were racing through
the countryside coding Flex apps
Thanks guys. I’ve checked about the TEXTFORMAT. It all makes sense, though I still feel the “Working With the File System” name seems a bit over the top. It is just me, because I work in the storage technologies.
It looks really nice but dosn’t provide any appealing feature..
@Rich Apps Consulting:
Then you’re completely missing the point of the application.
Tour de Flex is a showcase application, an explorer, a reference and a teaching tool that works on a variety of levels. If you’ve missed this obvious fact, then look again.