I know it's a very complex control but I'd still suggest, for the future, a multiline text entry field with the following rich text features:
- text styles bold, underline, italic; sticky and non-sticky
- text color
- different fonts in one field
- paragraph alignment
- simple inline images, for many purposes an option to add an image in a line is enough, where the surrounding text is aligned bottom, center, or top
- "standard" import/export format: html, xml, rtf, markdown, or whatever else you think is best, but not something totally non-standard
- custom data ranges with an option to extend them when writing text (like a sticky style) and an option for mouse callbacks/clickbacks
The last one requires explanation. An entry field should allow some way to add custom data to ranges of glyphs and some way of retrieving it by cursor position or mouse position. This is hard to implement later by a user of the library without access to the underlying implementation, because that would require one to maintain some parallel data structure and capture all edit events. If you miss one way the text might be changed, then the data structures get our of sync, so it's much better to have a way to add more functionality directly with the styled text. I'm thinking about hyperlinks, tooltips, etc.
Background: The reason I add this very general feature request is that I've seen dozens of handmade GUI libraries for various languages, and they all lack in the above functionality. So people turn to Qt or browser-based overblown solutions instead.
I know it's a very complex control but I'd still suggest, for the future, a multiline text entry field with the following rich text features:
The last one requires explanation. An entry field should allow some way to add custom data to ranges of glyphs and some way of retrieving it by cursor position or mouse position. This is hard to implement later by a user of the library without access to the underlying implementation, because that would require one to maintain some parallel data structure and capture all edit events. If you miss one way the text might be changed, then the data structures get our of sync, so it's much better to have a way to add more functionality directly with the styled text. I'm thinking about hyperlinks, tooltips, etc.
Background: The reason I add this very general feature request is that I've seen dozens of handmade GUI libraries for various languages, and they all lack in the above functionality. So people turn to Qt or browser-based overblown solutions instead.