Trying to set the colour for hyperlinks in QTextBrowser

Perdrix

I added the following at the start of the text browser content:

<head><style>a:link {color: #e0ffff;}</style></head> <body bgcolor=#1e1e1e>

using insertHTML().

I expected it to change the colour of hyperlinks, but it doesn't seem to do so.

What am I doing wrong please?

JonB

@Perdrix
My recommendation: first determine how links are being output as HTML in QTextBrowser, e.g. are they <a> elements, does it maybe insert a <span>? Then get whatever working directly on the HTML link. Finally try moving that to the <head><style>a:link ... global rule.

Remember QTextBrowser is by no means full HTML, only certain things work.

Perdrix

@JonB The links added to the text browser are simple <a href = "%1">%2</a> with .arg substitution.

Perdrix

@Perdrix Should I instead be using setStyleSheet() on the text browser object? If so what should I specify as the string for that?

JoeCFD

@Perdrix QTextBrowser inherits QTextEdit

#include <QApplication>
#include <QTextEdit>
#include <QTextDocument>

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
    QApplication a(argc, argv);

    // Create a QTextEdit widget
    QTextEdit textEdit;

    // Set HTML content with color and style
    QString htmlContent = "<span style='color:red; font-weight:bold;'>Hello, <i>world!</i></span>";
    textEdit.setHtml(htmlContent);

    // Show the QTextEdit widget
    textEdit.show();

    return a.exec();
}

Perdrix

@JoeCFD I don't think that's relevant to the colour of hyperlinks ...

JoeCFD

@Perdrix Try it out

#include <QApplication>
#include <QTextEdit>
#include <QTextDocument>

#include <iostream>

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) 
{
    QApplication app(argc, argv);

    // Create a QTextEdit widget
    QTextEdit textEdit;
    
    QString htmlContent = QString( "<head></head><body><p>Visit the <a href=\"https://www.example.com\"><span style=\"color: blue;\">Example Website</span></a>.</p> </body>" );

    // Set HTML content with color and style
    //QString htmlContent = "<span style='color:red; font-weight:bold;'>Hello, <i>world!</i></span>";
    textEdit.setHtml(htmlContent);

    // Show the QTextEdit widget
    textEdit.show();

    return app.exec();
}

ChrisW67

@Perdrix Your CSS works for me on unvisited links (a:link selector).

#include <QApplication>
#include <QTextBrowser>
#include <QTextDocument>

#include <iostream>

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    QApplication app(argc, argv);
    QTextBrowser textBrowser;
    QString htmlContent = QString( R"(
<head>
  <style>
    a:link    {color: red; }
  </style>
</head>
<body>
  <p><a href="#link">Link</a></p>
</body>
)" );

    textBrowser.setHtml(htmlContent);
    textBrowser.show();
    return app.exec();
}

Perdrix

@ChrisW67 All working now I used:

<a style="font-size:16px; color:#e0ffff;" href="link" etc.

Thanks to all
David

JonB

@Perdrix
So why didn't what you had work in the first place? What did you change that made it work?

Perdrix

@JonB I've no idea

Gojir4

@Perdrix Sorry to come later on this. But there is an interesting note about this in documentation of QPalette:

Note that we do not use the Link and LinkVisited roles when rendering rich text in Qt, and that we recommend that you use CSS and the QTextDocument::setDefaultStyleSheet() function to alter the appearance of links. For example:

QTextBrowser browser;
QColor linkColor(Qt::red);
QString sheet = QString::fromLatin1("a { text-decoration: underline; color: %1 }").arg(linkColor.name());
browser.document()->setDefaultStyleSheet(sheet);