[comp.windows.x] Better "text" object than XView textsw wanted

dab@esl.ESL.COM (David A. Brown) (11/20/90)

I'm writing a hypertext editor on a Sun running OpenWindows 2.0 and am
looking for X text-editing objects more powerful than Sun's "textsw".

I'm mostly interested in:

- Displaying icons/glyphs which can flow with the text (to use as
  hypertext "tags")

- Having fancy control over text coloring, fonts or background color
  (e.g. to be able to "highlight" like a highlighting marker)

I've seen this done on a NeXT (apparently the NeXT Text object gives
you all this for free; you can insert an arbitrary graphical "cell"
anywhere in the text, and you can do font and color changes using Rich
Text format).

I'm running OpenWindows 2.0; my application is written in XView.  Does
anyone know of a solution to this problem involving enhancements to
Sun's textsw package, or else using another X object that I can
integrate into my XView code?

Thanks for your help,

- David Brown            dab@esl.com          ESL Inc., Sunnyvale, CA

janssen@parc.xerox.com (Bill Janssen) (11/22/90)

In article <360@esl.ESL.COM> dab@esl.ESL.COM (David A. Brown) writes:

   I'm mostly interested in:

   - Displaying icons/glyphs which can flow with the text (to use as
     hypertext "tags")

   - Having fancy control over text coloring, fonts or background color
     (e.g. to be able to "highlight" like a highlighting marker)

How about an Andrew text object?  Look at the toolkit in
X11R4/contrib/toolkits/andrew.  The Andrew text widget is a styled
text editor, modelled after emacs as far as its keystrokes go, but
with reasonable mouse support as well.  Font styles are supported, and
highlighting is provided.  Embedded objects can be placed in the flow
of the text, and they can be any kind of Andrew dataobject: more text,
pictures, bitmaps, spreadsheets, animations, file reference buttons,
etc.  Arbitrary spans can be defined on the text, so it becomes quite
handy for hypertext work.  I can tell you more about mixing it with
XView if you're interested.

Bill
--
 Bill Janssen        janssen@parc.xerox.com      (415) 494-4763
 Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, California   94304