After several tests, I decided to abandon rtf areas because I had problems with page breaks, lot of code in the field and no visual advantages against html.
But, using html areas to write product descriptions is a real pain: returns disappearing, text alignment not sticking, font size changing on screen after closing a window…
In short: quite a lot of work to have a decently formatted text.
Somebody has a suggestion (or a good alternative)?
Servoy 3.1
Java 1.5
MacOS X.4.8
Hi Ric,
I think you go beyond the Sun implementation of HTML because I use HTML for reports both printing and on-screen and it has proven to be very reliable…
IT2Be:
Hi Ric,I think you go beyond the Sun implementation of HTML because I use HTML for reports both printing and on-screen and it has proven to be very reliable…
Using html area field on a layout doesn’t seem to me “to go beyond”
See attach: it’s only one of the problems I get, quite randomly.
Are you editing or displaying?
IT2Be:
Are you editing or displaying?
Editing.
Other problems I frequently encounter: I hit return and nothing seems to happen (the cursor remains where it was). I hit return a second time and the cursor moves down of two lines.
Or: I create a list of items, I close the editing FID and the list becomes a single line (returns are changed to spaces). I do the same thing a second time and the list is saved correctly.
And so on…
If you don’t have any of those problems, could you tell me if you use some special technique?
For displaying I don’t do anything special other than really basic html.
For editing I would consider the SHE plugin that Direct ICT sells…
IT2Be:
For displaying I don’t do anything special other than really basic html.For editing I would consider the SHE plugin that Direct ICT sells…
SHE plugin is an excellent product, but having the ability to input styled text should be included in the standard features set.
Moreover, now I’m also having problems with html loosing text: in the situation described above, if I enter some text after hitting return twice on a formindialog, then I close the formindialog, the new text is lost!
I hope that this problem will be fixed asap but, more in general, I think that Servoy should provide a better html support.
Riccardino:
I hope that this problem will be fixed asap but, more in general, I think that Servoy should provide a better html support.
I agree.
Wasn’t there a plan to include IceBrowser bean in Servoy 3.0?
I think that in the age of the web 2.0, having a modern http support is really important.
Hi,
we had to abandon editing of styled text using the built in HTML and RTF views a couple of months ago due to problems similar to the above. Our current work-around is to use a standard text area, and tell the users input Textile markup. They can see a preview in IT2be’s Browser Bean or in their web browser.
We are using some open source JavaScript code which does the basics. There has been some discussion on the net whether it is actually possible to implement the full spec using Javascript.
Full converters are available in Ruby… so we may end up to embedding some 3 lines of Ruby code in the client to get full Textile. Not so much of a problem on the Mac, since Ruby is part of the OS, but would be a bit more complicated on Windows.
Hi Cristian, Nicola,
I noticed that you have been looking at using formatted text in Servoy.
What are you using these days to edit/display and print formatted text (bold/italic/font/underline)
Html_area/Rtf_area or something else ?
Regards,
Hi Hans, I’m using the IT2Be HTML Editor plugin to let the users edit styled html text and the standard HTML Area to show the field, for the time being it’s the best we can do IMO.
ngervasi:
Hi Hans, I’m using the IT2Be HTML Editor plugin to let the users edit styled html text and the standard HTML Area to show the field, for the time being it’s the best we can do IMO.
I use this same setup for my clients as well. Mostly for more advanced HTML emails. For very simple requirements you can use the HTML_AREA for input as well but it does have some quirks as you can read in this thread.
Thanks for your answers.
I also need to extract the unformated text.
When using Rtf_area i can use getAsPlainText().
This gives me the exact text without the formatting.
This does not work very well with html_area though ( loosing linefeeds, to many spaces, etc)
Thats why i am not to keen to use Html.
Any expirience with that ??
Regards,
It is not part of the html editor right now but that could be built in without too much work…
Hi,
In the solution we are going to use, there are a few fields in which the user might want to do some formatting.
99% of the time they will only enter normal text. Only sometimes they want to higlight some text by
using another font / bold / italic/ underline and maybe colour (not nescecarry).
I noticed that entering text in a html_area does not work nice.
Linefeeds act strange and when you try to enter a space before a text at the beginning of a line
it looks oke, but i is gone when you requery. I did not test any further.
So they would have to do all edit actions inside the html_editor even if they do not need text formatting.
When using a Rtf_area users can enter text just as they would in a textarea and the (simple) formatting can also be done there.
getAsPlainText() works fine for a rtf_area.
I even managed to write some regex expressions to get the clean text out of the rtf field.
I also wrote a regex for a html_area.
I will need that if i want to do a query on the Oracle database fields. I use Oracles regexp_replace for that.
So i gues i will give rtf_area a go…
Thanks for all the advice !
Regards,
Have you had a look at Jeff Bader’s xml renderer?
