[Design] Rich text in Chandler desktop

[Robin Dunn]

Philippe Bossut wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Thanks Robin for the thorough answer. Exploring the use of 
> wxRichTextCtrl was the venue I proposed at the meeting. Looks like your 
> expertize is saving us lots of time here... :)
> 
> One thing in your comment though made me raise one worried eyebrow:
> 
> Robin Dunn wrote:
>>
>> In addition to the lack of DnD support mentioned above the 
>> RichTextCtrl still needs to add the ability to read/write standard 
>> formats such as RTF or HTML, (currently it only uses a custom XML 
>> format,) gain some performance improvements, and complete the wxPython 
>> wrapper.
>>
> That's the "custom XML format" that gets me worried: since we're 
> planning to use that in email editing, we can't really send around 
> custom XML. How would that be displayed in other email clients? AFAIK, 
> RTF is the way to go for basic email fancy work (bkirsch, please confirm 
> or deny, I'm really not sure here...). Is there a method to convert back 
> and forth between this format and RTF?

It's just a matter of implementing handler classes for the other 
formats.  The plan is to allow multiple read/write formats, and the 
infrastructures is in place to do so, but all that is done so far is the 
XML and it also looks like a HTML handler class has been done too since 
I last checked.  I don't know how complete it is though.

> 
> Also, reflecting on Mimi's initial list, the only thing that I'm really 
> dearly missing right now in Chandler display of emails is the detection 
> of URLs: coloring them and making them clickable. That was not in your 
> list Mimi and I'd happily forgo all the rest for just that one feature...

If it can't already do that it probably wouldn't be too hard to add. 
There are various container and content objects in use while the 
document is in memory, and it looks like adding and using another type 
should be straight forward.

-- 
Robin Dunn
Software Craftsman
http://wxPython.org  Java give you jitters?  Relax with wxPython!