DTRichTextEditor
DTRichTextEditorView a view that combines the richness of DTCoreText with UITextInput to give you the editing capabilities you need to change text editing on iOS forever.
The component is currently in an accelerated availability stage with one commercial pilot app being almost finished. Or put differently this is sort of a BETA stage where you can get access to the component for testing and adding the last few features to it that you need for your own special case of rich text editing.
DTRichTextEditorView is fantastic! I was able to implement syntax highlighting behavior in under an hour. Performance is stellar as well. - Illya Busigin
These are the currently implemented features and what is still not in there:
- set the contents of the editor view either from an NSAttributedString or HTML
- move cursor by long pressing, circular loupe
- move selection handles by long pressing or dragging them, rectangular loupe
- change selection with hardware keyboard, cursor keys and change selection holding Shift
- enter text via on-screen or hardware keyboard
- support for entering text that requires marking, e.g. japanese characters
- support for adding images either inline or in their own paragraph
- Auto-Completion implemented (where it suggests a word while you are typing)
- Auto-Correction – NOT YET (where a suspected misspelled word has a red dotted underline)
- Toggling of bold, italic and underlined
- Your own custom views over links, videos or images
- Scrolling capability, the editor is a UIScrollView subclass that does not override the delegate
- Pasteboard, cut/copy/paste plain text, post NSURL or UIImage. Copy rich text to and from the component with the same format that Safari uses: DTWebArchive.
- Context menu. TO ADD: support for your own menu items to show up after selecting text
Here is a video demo that I made some time ago. The component has progressed quite a bit since then, but this shows you the basic features.
I wouldn’t try to use this for very long documents yet because there some work still remains to do partial layouting of an attributed string and merging the results into an existing display. But for most regular use cases it should work well.
Price: 500 EUR (How many U.S. Dollars?)
Parts Categories: Cocoanetics
What’s the use of this component, if the resulting content cannot be transformed back to HTML, anyway? In QA part you’re saying that needs a lot of work, still.
So let’s suppose one transforms HTML, renders it onto screen, does some editing on it, and than…. wants to save.
But he/she cannot save it….
basic transformation back to HTML is implemented, see the htmlString method in the NSAttributedString+HTML project.
Will this be suitable for text selection which is based on the parsed contents of a PDF?
Please see my question in stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7552258/pdf-text-selection-on-ios
No, it won’t. This works with HTML.
Is search supported or at least an API via which one could hilight searched phrases temporarily?
I’m working on a MacOS app that will include the ability for the user to edit text using multiple fonts, styles, lists, colors, lists, etc. This text will most likely be stored in Core Data, unless there is a very good reason to do otherwise. It’s not really a document based application, and most of the text entries will be keyed to other things and no more than a few paragraphs.
Once the MacOS app is finished, I’ll probably buy DTRichTextEditor and build an iOS version with most of the functionality of the MacOS version. I’m designing the Core Data store now and want to store the text in a way that will be accessible and editiable from both platforms (shared through iCloud or Dropbox).
Does this make sense? Is DTRichTextEditor the right tool for what I want? If so, in what format should I store the text from the MacOS app so that it will also work with DTRRichTextEditor?
DTRichTextEditor is based on my open-source NSAttributedString+HTML which in turn tries to mimic functionality that also exists on Mac. The editor works with attributed strings, so if you can persist your attributed strings in a CoreData DB and have classes to encode and decode then you’re good to go. Possibly you will want to contribute these conversion to the project because some other people are looking for that as well. It’s currently not possible because the CoreText classes don’t work with encodeWithCoder on iOS.
Are there any existing apps that use this component so I can try it out from an end-user perspective? Is there demo code I can see? Is 500 EUR the price for the beta, or the final price once 1.0 is ready? I’m very interested in this component, but I can’t justify 500 EUR for a product I haven’t tested in any way.
Hi Dave,
500 Euros is for access to the SVN repository where the source code resides. So you will have lifelong access to that for this price. So far more than a dozen people have purchased access and are in various stages using it in apps.
One goal for the immediate future is to create and publish a Demo app on the app store and to publish a time-limited binary build demo of the library so that you can use and test it in your apps. But that will take some time , it’s on my list of new year’s resolutions.
Maybe you could publish the simulator binarys, so people who are interested in it could see how it’s working.
Is this appstore safe? Is this using undocumented APIs?
Of course it is app store safe.
Um, why “of course?” With no code to look at, no examples using your code on the app store, and not even a youtube video, why would anyone assume anything about this very expensive product?
Not sure how well this is selling… but $99 it would have been a no brainer. As it is… I’ll keep using a web-kit based solution.
DTRichTextEditor
Can this price 500€ buy Source code?
Yes you get full access to the SVN repository where this component lives and development continues.
I think the price is perfectly reasonable, but I really would like a demo app or library before purchasing.
What I saw in the video looks like it has all the features I need right now. You might sell more licenses with a demo-able product than one with more features. How is the demo app/library project coming along?
Doug
I am on vacation next week and over my head in work. But I’ll try to put up demo versions of all components over the next month or so.
Nice work. Any plans to support and ? Also, I see you support image attachments. Can any UIView be displayed as an attachment?
That should have been “Any plans to support table and list tags?”
Plans yes. Time and Funding, not yet. At least for tables. Lists are about 90% done, they are done in DTCoreText and the editing of a single-level list is missing a few relatively minor pieces.
Looks like a great component! How much has the component changed since the demo video? I agree dwsjoquist that either a demo app or an updated demo video would be great to see the full potential of the component.
Hi, which is the minimum iOS deployment target for DTRichTextEditor?
Thank you
iOS 4.3, same as for DTCoreText
Does this handle things like text alignment, lists (bullets, numbers) and tabs and have full support for languages like japanese?
thanks
Nick
Text alignment: YES
Lists: work in progress
Asian input support: YES
Tabs: only what you directly set in CTParagraphStyle, no convenience methods yet