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| Parsing formatting markup |
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| <H1> |
| Parsing formatting markup</H1> |
| <p align="left">The most powerful use of the <code>FormText</code> control is |
| when formatting tags are added to the text. The expected root tag is <code>form</code>. |
| It can have one or more children that can either be <code><p></code> or <code><li></code>. |
| Either of these can have normal text, text between <code><b></code> or <code> |
| <span></code> tags, images, links and <code>SWT</code> controls. Images are |
| declared using <code><img href="<i>image key</i>"/></code> (no content), while |
| links are expressed using <code><a href="<i>href</i>">text</a></code>.</p> |
| <p align="left">Some of the tags mentioned above have additional attributes. Tag |
| <code><a></code> can accept <code>nowrap="true"</code> to block the link from |
| being wrapped into the new line. Tag <code><p></code> can have attribute <code> |
| vspace="false"</code> (<code>true</code> by default) that adds additional space |
| between paragraphs. Tag <code><li></code> has more attributes:</p> |
| <ul> |
| <li> |
| <p align="left"><b>style</b> - can be <code>text</code>, <code>bullet</code> |
| and <code>image</code> (default is <code>bullet</code>)</p></li> |
| <li> |
| <p align="left"><b>value</b> - not used for <code>bullet</code>; if style is |
| <code>text</code>, the value will be rendered instead in place of a bullet; |
| if style is <code>image</code>, value represents a key in the image table of |
| an image to be rendered in place of a bullet</p></li> |
| <li> |
| <p align="left"><b>vspace</b> - the same as for the '<code>p</code>' tag.</p> |
| </li> |
| <li> |
| <p align="left"><b>indent</b> - the number of pixels to indent text</p></li> |
| <li> |
| <p align="left"><b>bindent</b> - the number of pixels to indent the bullet |
| (this number is independent from 'indent' - be careful not to overlap them)</p> |
| </li> |
| </ul> |
| <p>Tags that affect appearance of the normal text are <code><b></code> (works as |
| expected), and <code><span></code>. The later allows you to change font and/or |
| color of the text within the tag. Finally, soft line breaks can be added using |
| <code><br/></code> tag (note that this is XML, so you cannot use open <code><br></code> |
| as in HTML).</p> |
| <p>Since release 3.1, <code>FormText</code> can be used to mix SWT widgets |
| inside text, hyperlinks and images. SWT controls are created as children of |
| <code>FormText</code>, which makes <code>FormText</code> a layout manager of a |
| sort, with instruction on where to place the control relative to text embedded |
| directly in the XML.</p> |
| <p>One common theme that can be observed is that <code>FormText</code> is not |
| responsible for loading images, fonts, resolving links or colors. This is not a |
| browser and it is much better to separate concerns and simply assign images and |
| colors managed elsewhere. Both links and images simply have '<code>href</code>' |
| attribute to reference them. For links, the value of this attribute will be |
| provided in the hyperlink event when listeners are notified. Images need to be |
| registered with the text control using the matching 'href' key. This way, the |
| control does not need to worry about loading the images - it has them in the |
| hash table and can render them immediately.</p> |
| <p>Similar approach has been used for colors and fonts. Colors are already |
| handled by the toolkit, so you can allocate as many as you want using a unique |
| key and RGB values by calling <code>toolkit.getColors().createColor()</code>. |
| What is left is to set all the colors referenced in the '<code>span</code>' tag |
| so that the control will be able to use them during rendering.</p> |
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