CWAC RichEditText: Letting Users Make Text Pretty
UPDATE: This project is discontinued. This repo will be taken private on or after 12/1/2021
Android's EditText widget supports formatted (a.k.a.,
"rich text") editing. It just lacks any way for the user
to supply formatting, and it does not provide much in the
way of convenience methods for a developer to, say, tie
in some sort of toolbar to allow users to format selections.
That's where RichEditText comes in.
RichEditText is a drop-in replacement for EditText that:
Provides an action mode on Android 4.0+ that allows
users to format selected pieces of text
Provides convenience methods to allow developers to
trigger formatting for selected text via other means
This widget is packaged as an Android Studio library module, with
a demo/ subdirectory containing a regular Android Studio app module
with a couple of activities demonstrating the use of
RichEditText.
This library also contains a series of utility classes for working
with rich text. In particular, it has code to convert a Spanned to
and from XHTML, as an alternative to the toHtml()
and fromHtml() methods on Android's Html class.
In addition to the documentation on this page,
partial JavaDocs are also available for the editor widget
and the utility classes.
This Android library project is available as an artifact for use
with Gradle. To use that, add the following
blocks to your build.gradle file:
repositories {
maven {
url "https://s3.amazonaws.com/repo.commonsware.com"
}
}
dependencies {
compile 'com.commonsware.cwac:richedit:0.5.3'
}
Or, if you cannot use SSL, use http://repo.commonsware.com for the repository
URL.
If you are not using Gradle, download or clone this repo, and add the richedit/
module to your Android Studio project as a library module.
NOTE: This project is no longer compatible with Eclipse at the source
level, as of version 0.5.0. A ZIP file containing what should be an Eclipse-compatible
project is in the releases area.
However, this ZIP file has not been tested — please file bug reports
if you encounter problems with it.
NOTE: If you were using v0.2.0 with ActionBarSherlock, ActionBarSherlock
support was removed from this project as of v0.3.0. Please remain on v0.2.0,
or switch to the native API Level 11+ action bar (a.k.a., "15 is the new 10").
Usage: RichEditText
Simply add com.commonsware.cwac.richedit.RichEditText
widgets to your layout as needed:
android:id="@+id/editor"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="fill_parent"
android:gravity="top|left"
android:inputType="textMultiLine">
At this time, there are no custom attributes used by
RichEditText.
On its own, by default, RichEditText provides one means of users
applying formatting: the standard - for bold,
- for italics, and - for underline work if there
is a selection. You can disable this by calling
setKeyboardShortcutsEnabled(false).
If you want an on-screen UI for formatting, you have two choices.
First, you can call
enableActionModes() on the RichEditText. This will add a "FORMAT"
entry on the action mode that comes up when the user highlights some
prose in the editor. Tapping that will allow the user to toggle various
effects.
The action modes work so-so on phones at this time —
tablets work better. To get it to work on phones at all, you will need
to include android:imeOptions="flagNoExtractUi" as an attribute on the
RichEditText.
NOTE: The action modes do not work on Android 5.1 and higher. They will be
deprecated in an upcoming release of this library and will be removed
entirely before the library reaches 1.0. A stock toolbar implementation
will be provided instead as the out-of-the-box way to offer users the
ability to control effects.
Alternatively, you can have
your own toolbar or gesture interface or
whatever to allow users to format text. In that case, here are the two key
methods to call on RichEditText:
applyEffect() changes the current selection, applying
or removing an effect (e.g., making the selection bold). The
first parameter is the effect to apply (e.g., RichEditText.BOLD).
The second parameter is the new value for the effect. Many
effects take boolean values, so applyEffect(RichEditText.BOLD, true)
would format the current selection as bold.
setOnSelectionChangedListener() is where you register a
RichEditText.OnSelectionChangedListener object, which will
be called with onSelectionChanged() whenever the user changes
the selection in the widget (i.e., highlights text or taps
to un-select the highlight). You are provided the start and
end positions of the selection (as were supplied to onSelectionChanged()
to RichEditText itself by Android), plus a list of effects
that are active on that selection. This will allow you to
update your toolbar to indicate what is and is not in use,
and so you know what to do when the user taps on one of
those toolbar buttons again.
Supported Effects
At the time of this writing, here are the RichEditText
static data members for each supported effect:
BOLD
ITALIC
UNDERLINE
STRIKETHROUGH
SUPERSCRIPT
SUBSCRIPT
TYPEFACE
ABSOLUTE_SIZE
RELATIVE_SIZE
URL
BACKGROUND (color)
FOREGROUND (color)
There are other effects presently implemented, but they
will be revised shortly, including name and data type
changes, so don't mess with them yet.
To use the BACKGROUND and FOREGROUND effects, you will need to call
setColorPicker() on the RichEditText widget, supplying an implementation
of the ColorPicker interface. That has one required method: pick().
It receives a ColorPickerOperation, on which you can call hasColor()
(returns true if we are editing an existing color) and getColor()
(returns the existing color value, if applicable). Your job is to
collect a color from the user, then call either onColorPicked()
(supplying the color) or onPickerDismissed() (indicating that
the user abandoned the request for a color and that the selection
should remain unchanged). See the demo app for an example
implementation.
Known Limitations: RichEditText
This widget has not been tested with the AppCompat action bar backport.
Most likely, it will not work well. AppCompat support is planned, at
least to get a Toolbar implementation going. Tint support will be
added as well, if and only if the process for doing so is documented.
The demo app uses a ColorMixerActivity from
the CWAC-ColorMixer library
for its implementation of ColorPicker. While easy to integrate, this approach
has one major flaw: the color picker remains in the foreground after
a configuration change. Since the demo activity is recreated, so its its
RichEditText widget, and any existing selection (or ColorPickerOperation)
is lost. What the demo app should do is dismiss the color picker on a
configuration change, since the chosen color will not be applied anyway.
Usage: XHTML Conversion
This library also contains classes to convert
Spanned objects to/from XHTML.
Scope of Support
The primary objective of this conversion logic is to support the
formatting offered by the RichEditText widget.
Apps that wish to allow users to enter in rich text can use
RichEditText, then persist the Spanned using this library. Later
on, if the user wants to edit rich text entered previously, the app
can convert the XHTML back into a Spanned to supply to RichEditText.
A secondary objective is to allow the resulting persisted value to be
usable by anything that needs an XHTML representation of rich text.
For example, you might supply the XHTML to a Web service, or upload
it to a Web site. That's why XHTML is chosen as the representation format,
as opposed to some sort of Serializable or other binary packaging.
Whereas Html.fromHtml() is designed to parse semi-arbitrary HTML,
this library is not. You are welcome to feed it XHTML from wherever and
see if it works. As the saying goes, YMMV.
Basic Parsing and Generating
Given a Spanned (e.g., getText() on a RichEditText), to get an
XHTML representation of the Spanned, create an instance of
SpannedXhtmlGenerator and call toXhtml() on it. This will return
a String of XHTML.
Later on, to get the Spanned back from that XHTML, create an instance
of a SpannableStringGenerator and call fromXhtml() on it, passing
it the String of XHTML, and getting back a a Spannable that you can
use with RichEditText or whatever.
And that's pretty much it.
Conversion Rules
A stock set of rules, embodied in a collection of SpanTagHandler
instances, are applied to convert the Spanned to XHTML and back again:
CharacterStyle
XHTML Tag Structure
AbsoluteSizeSpan
BackgroundColorSpan
BulletSpan
inside of aForegroundColorSpan
LineAlignmentSpan
RelativeSizeSpan
StrikethroughSpan
StyleSpan
or
SubscriptSpan
SuperscriptSpan
TypefaceSpan
UnderlineSpan
URLSpan
Customizing the Conversion
If there are new CharacterStyle subclasses that you want to support,
and you want to do so on a global (process-level) basis, create
a subclass of SpanTagHandler and register it via
registerGlobalSpanTagHandler() on the SpanTagHandler class.
If you want to override the default rules, create a subclass
(or subclasses) of SpanTagHandler for those rules. Then, create
an instance of SpanTagRoster and register your handlers via
registerSpanTagHandler() on the roster. You can pass in your
roster to the constructor of SpannedXhtmlGenerator or
SpannableStringGenerator.
There are a bunch of implemenations of SpanTagHandler, for the
stock rules, in the com.commonsware.cwac.richtextutils.handler
package, so you can see what creating these looks like.
There is also a ClassSpanTagHandler that you can use to
use a tag for a particular CharacterStyle, if
you want to use CSS classes for the actual formatting rules.
Note, though, that if you customize the rules by any of these
mechanisms, it is incumbent upon you to keep those customizations.
If you generate XHTML using one set of rules, you need to use
the same (or a compatible) set of rules to restore the Spanned.
Known Limitations
Two start tags in sequence may be flipped in order during conversion.
So, for example, suppose you had Foo, and you converted
that into a Spanned, then back into XHTML. The resulting XHTML could
be the same or could be Foo.
It is possible that multiple elements will be applied for the
same text (e.g., it is adjusted using a RelativeSizeSpan and a
BackgroundColorSpan). No attempt is made to coalesce those
elements into one, even though from an XHTML standpoint, this is certainly
possible (and perhaps even desired).
The XHTML generated by this library is unofficial until the library
reaches 1.0. At that point, the XHTML specification will remain fixed
through point-level releases (e.g., 1.1) until the next major release
(e.g., 2.0). Hence, until the library reaches 1.0, and for major
releases after that, you may need to go through some cleanup logic, as
your XHTML may not be parsed the same way as it had been in earlier
versions of the library.
Dependencies
There are no third-party dependencies at this time for the library.
The demo app depends not only on this library but also on
the CWAC-ColorMixer library.
This project should work on API Level 11 and higher, except for any portions that
may be noted otherwise in this document. Please report bugs if you find features
that do not work on API Level 11 and are not noted as requiring a higher version.
Version
This is version v0.5.3 of this module, the last version that is expected to
be released, as this project is discontinued.
Demo
In the demo/ module you will find
a sample activity that demonstrates the use of RichEditText.
In the demo-utils/ module you will find a sample activity that demonstrates
the use of the the XHTML utilties.
Also, the androidTest/ directory in the main/ sourceset of the
richedit/ module contains a number of instrumentation tests.
License
The code in this project is licensed under the Apache
Software License 2.0, per the terms of the included LICENSE
file.
Questions
This project is discontinued.
Release Notes
v0.5.3: applied supplied fix for issue 33
v0.5.2: bug fixes
v0.5.1: fixed issue 15 and issue 17
v0.5.0: added preliminary support for bullets, added XHTML conversion classes
v0.4.0: added support for size, color, and URL effects
v0.3.1: updated for Android Studio 1.0 and new AAR publishing system
v0.3.0: removed ActionBarSherlock support, icon for FORMAT action mode item, fixed clipboard bug, added Gradle support
v0.2.0: added keyboard shortcuts for bold/italic/underline and test suite, bug fixes
v0.1.1: added disableActionModes() and fixed bug related to conditional action mode usage
v0.1: added action mode support using ActionBarSherlock for pre-Honeycomb devices
v0.0.3: removed RichEditor, replaced it with custom action modes
v0.0.2: added RichEditor and made various fixes
v0.0.1: initial release
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