How to make a custom EditText tool bar? - android

I am currently trying to make a Writing program. I would like the functionality of an Edit tool bar that contains things such as BOLD, ITALIC, UNDERLINE, etc. I see that it is under Typeface but I'm struggling to figure out how to make it function on just selected text or just for formatting text. I already have the GUI and button listeners in place. Thanks.

There is nothing really built into Android for this, except at a fairly low level. I have the beginnings of a RichEditText custom widget, as a drop-in EditText replacement, but it needs a fair bit of work, which I will get to later in June (I hope I hope I hope).
In a nutshell, you will need to get a Spannable object from your EditText via getText(), then call methods like setSpan() on it to apply your formatting.

Two words my friend, "creative commons". In my experience, mundane pieces of code like date/time pickers, RTF text boxes, etc.. they've all been coded and thought through more thoroughly than you'll ever have the time for. For something like this, don't reinvent the wheel, check out someone else's code, build on it, and check it back in.

Related

Live formatting editText with markups/markdown

I have a slight issue. I wanna do something like we have here where we put in format markers such as this and this but I want it to appear in the edit text but not remove the marks for it. At the moment I'm achieving this with a preview button which displays an AlertDialog to show the previewed text.
I'm not sure which code to show as I have no idea how to do this at all. I also have no idea where to start on something like this. I've tried doing tons of research and it formats one word and then completely removes the markup/down for it.
Any help will be appreciated and I'm happy to supply any code whatsoever :)
I achieved this using a third-party library RichEditor and took the ones that I needed. It works really well for what I needed so I would recommend it for people to use.
It uses a webview for the EditText and then converts the text into a WYSIWYG formatting.

Create a textfield which only supports copy-option

Is there a way to make a textfield (EditText, TextView) on Android which displays copyable text (no edit options)? Something like Swing's JTextField().setEditable(false) on Windows?
Edit: It seems that my question was a little bit unclear, so I'm going to give it some real-world context. I am working on a checksum calculator which lets you pick a file and prints the results of the calculation into 4 different textfields. I want the user to be able to copy those hashes from the textfield, but to disable all edit options.
I believe what you are asking is very straightforward and simple, if I am reading your question wrong, please correct me!
Are the four text fields that hold the results required to be EditText 's?
otherwise - >
Question:
How to make TextView only copyable, not editable
Answer:
Well using a TextView solves the not editable part
and if you take a look
at my android studio. I have a simple TextView with an attribute of
textIsSelectable="true"
allowing users to copy and paste!
Hope this helped!
-Stephen

Android - call TextWatcher for highlighted text

So I'm new to Android development and I'm currently figuring out TextWatcher.
What I'm attempting to do is attach my TextWatcher listener to an EditText widget and after the user has put in some text, say "Hello" and he highlights "llo" and types in r, I display the change in a TextView widget. For the above example it will display "llo --> r".
Now from what I've read and tried, since the textchangelistener is called every time the user types in something, my code ended up crashing when I ran it on my phone.
Is there a way to call the listener only when the highlighted text is changed so as to avoid calling it every time I'm just typing something in the EditText widget? I hope my question makes sense, I've tried looking around before posting here but I couldn't find anything.
Not looking for code, just some pointers so I can figure out how to do this.
Thanks!
Your best bet would be to use a OnEditorActionListener instead of a textwatcher which I didnt know existed until now. It gets called when there is a change to a textview, and since edit text is a textview than it will work perfectly.
Heres some info on the listener
Btw welcome to the android platform, I think you'll find that it is a rich language and definitely worth learning. If you really want some pointers your main point of reference should be this link which has many guidelines and pointers in the develop tab. Good luck

How to create a rich text editor in Android [duplicate]

I am wondering if there are any good options to implement a rich text editor in Android. Please note I am talking about a rich text editor that can be used in an Android application, not the one embedded in a web page using HTML and Javascript.
My requirements are:
Basic formatting (color, fonts, highlight, bold, italic, underline, etc.)
Hyperlinks
Inline images
Bullet lists and numbered lists
Inline table (only the contents inside a cell is editable, not the table structure)
As you can see, this is pretty much something quite similar to a typical RichEdit control on Windows.
Here are some efforts (investigation & prototyping) I have made so far:
Using WebView
I have tried using a WebView control to load an HTML fragment with one . The content becomes editable and as it is HTML, I suppose it can meet most of my requirements. But it has several issues:
(deadly) No text caret. The user will have no idea where his/her typed characters will be inserted.
The on-screen soft keyboard is not visible by default. There is a trick that the user has to long-press the Menu button to bring up the keyboard. But I think this is a very bad user experience. Besides, the screen layout is not properly rearranged and the text inserting point sometimes will be covered by the keyboard.
Using EditText
I have tried using the EditText control. It seems to support some level of rich text editing (color, fonts, bold, italic, underline, inline images, bullet lists). But I still cannot figure out how I can implement the following requirements:
Control the appereance of the bullet symbol (dot, circle, dash, arrow, star, etc.)
Numbered list (1., 2., 3., etc.)
Table
BTW, I have seen there are several *Span classes out there but I am not sure if they can be any help... And the http://developer.android.com does not provide much useful information about them.
So, how on earth can I implement a rich text editor on Android?
Can I extends the EditText and add my new functionalities? Or should I do something from scratch - extends the View and implement everything by myself? For later option (extending View), I actually even don't know how to show a text caret and blink it, not mentionging moving the caret with user typing.
I am desperate now... Any hints?
Thanks!
-Tony
(EDIT)
After some further investigation, it looks like extending EditText would be my best bet. I somehow figured out how to use those Span classes and guess I should be able to do most of the tricks by using (extending) them.
For example, extending the BulletSpan and overriding drawLeadingMargin should give me the control of the bullet appereances. Extending the LeadingMarginSpan should help me on the numbered list.
As to the table, my initial plan is to extend the LineBackgroundSpan and draw all the table borders in the drawBackground override. However, I still need to figure out how to layout all the text in the table cells and properly handle the caret movement and selection. Suggestions?
I just published my rich text editor component under the Apache 2.0 license:
https://github.com/1gravity/Android-RTEditor
You can make use of any of the following libraries:-
https://github.com/commonsguy/cwac-richedit
https://github.com/chinalwb/Android-Rich-text-Editor
https://github.com/wasabeef/richeditor-android
https://github.com/irshuLx/Android-WYSIWYG-Editor
I would probably extend both EditText and TableLayout or at least end up using most of their source if there were big enough changes I needed to make.
Can you do the following:
Manually hold the contents in the EditText as your own model (ie by seperating and maintaing the content document and the view attributes as seperate entities).
Override the render (or draw method) to do custom layout on parts of the content document (part of your model) that handle non text characters (say bullets with particular attribute).
To me seems like if you have to muck about with the layout, are you better off writing it from scratch on your own. From what I remember the Edit text (and the richt text editor) is great for anything where you the data is pure text.
There is an open source EditText rich text editor called android-richtexteditor but the code was inexplicably deleted in r5. The code is still there in r4; just use svn to check out r4 or earlier to access it. The code appears to support italics, underline, color picker, text size, and more.
Also answered in these questions: 1, 2
Extend from EditText is a best choice for you, it support CharacterSpan and
ParagraphSpan.
See my App on the Google Play:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hly.notes
Check this open source Wordpress mobile application for android.It has very promising Richtexteditor based on Edittext.
You can download the source from here
Thanks

Looking for Android number picker (10-key style)

I am looking around for a number picker in a 10-key style, ideally as a dialog... but called as an activity is fine too. I want to offer the user an interface that is a little more directed toward entering $ for an invoice amount field. I have seen adjustments to the date and time pickers but they looked awkward for this application. I have also seem someone call the built-in calculator, which would be fine, but I don't know how they were capturing a returned value (if they were). Any ideas? Yes, I can fall back to a regular edit field and the standard android keyboard... I was just hoping for something a little more slick. Thanks!
Have you tried setting the attribute android:numeric on the TextView?
TextView documentation

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