QtextEdit: custom text edition

[NicolasS]

Hi all,

I'd like to create a text editor allowing a user to add variables from a predefined list.

1. Once the variable is added, it should be treated as a block, it means :

• prevent the user from editing the text content,
• allow deleting the whole variable only
• prevent the cursor from blinking when the user click inside the text content

2. I would also need to format it in a nice way (with a custom font style and a border around it).

As a newbie with QTextEdit, I'd like some suggestion on which class could help me to achieve my goal.

Thanks by advance

[mrjj]

Hi
I assume you can do it with
http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtextobjectinterface.html#details
Maybe you can cheat at bit and use images
http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtsvg-richtext-textobject-example.html
Render nice text and border to image and show it. Im not sure if you can
interact with it. like clicking so maybe your own widget is easier.

[NicolasS]

Very nice. It's definitely be a good start !
Thanks @mrjj

[rosh]

@NicolasS was you able to implement your text editor with QTextObjectInterface ? I'm working on the similar problem, but additionally I need to handle mouse interactions with those custom "variables" (so each formatted block would have its context menu and can be drag n drop'ed, etc.).

[NicolasS]

Hello @rosh,

It was a little bit of a hack but we managed to make it works.
We represented those variables as images (we don't need standard images in our case).
The steps were:

1. Create a new handler for QTextFormat::ImageObject which inherits from QObject and QTextObjectInterface.
2. Register this handler
3. Each time a new variable has to be inserted to the document (via mime data in our case), a QTextImageFormat object is created with the right configuration (we use setProperty/property). Finaly, the variable is inserted through:
   cursor.insertText(QString(QChar::ObjectReplacementCharacter), imgFormat);

Hope this help