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Hello all!

There is one aspect of QTextEdit behavior that makes a problem for me. I mean auto-conversion of HTML formatting tags into corresponding font settings (font face, weight, etc.).

In my application, it is necessary to keep track of the current state of "style" of the text at cursor position, but if I create a document in QTextEdit containing e.g. <h1> tag, then it becomes quite difficult to match font parameters to <h1> when the cursor is in corresponding paragraph, and update "Paragraph style" combo box in a toolbar similarly to MS Word.

QTextEdit provides convenient means for keeping track of other simple text styles, like bold, italic, etc. But there's no support for even a bit more complex things like headings...why? It seems that there's no means to keep semantics of the original tag, as soon as it has been processed by QTextEdit.

Or maybe I don't know how to use it.

Any advice how to deal with my problem would be highly appreciated! Thanks in advance!

Sergey

Just to make things clear, I would like to correct the title of my question:

"How to obtain initial HTML tags (like <h1>) from the text processed by QTextEdit?"

or even

"Is it possible to associate any user-defined information with arbitrary piece of text in QTextEdit, apart from font settings?"

:-)
But I will see plain text with all tags instead of formatted text in such a case...this is not what the user expects from my application.

Quoted

Originally posted by djanubis
Rereading the whole thing, sounds you should dig in Qt examples directory from your Qt source tree. In textedit, you get realy waht you want, with style, colors, font size, paragraph alignment...

This is what I always start from: studying Qt examples. Unfortunately, TextEdit example doesn't deal with headings For other things which can be easily bound to font parameters, QTextEdit does provide convenient interface, no doubt.

Quoted

You could enhance it with QStyleSheet class wich allows for user defined style sheets for most tags.

Yes. And no. QStyleSheet simply provides QTextEdit with bindings "tag name --> font/paragraph parameters" which are used immediately after adding some HTML text into the widget. The result is processed HTML text containing tags DIFFERENT from the original. Roughly, most tags are converted into font parameters or something like this, so any additional semantics contained in original tags is lost :-( Therefore, I cannot understand, if a cursor is currently within text fragment previously marked with <h1></h1> tags...

It would be great if Trolltech developers thought a while about this problem and invented some solution, that would satisfy both them and those who want to have original HTML tags - or some information about them in processed HTML text - avaiable.

Below is a sample user scenario:

1. User enters some text in QTextEdit
2. User selects some text fragment in QTextEdit and then selects "Heading 1" style for the selected text (among Normal, Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3) with help of additional "Style" combo box
3. User enters some more text -> "Normal" item becomes current in "Style" combo box (by default, Normal text style is used for new user input)
4. User moves a text cursor into the text fragment having "Heading 1" style -> "Heading 1" item becomes current in "Style" combo box (in other words, this combo box tracks the text style at the cursor position).

Of course, I can implement some workaround to achieve such behavior. But it would be more elegant if QTextEdit itself supported it.

Quoted

Originally posted by djanubis
This can be achieved by extending the textedit sample to have a style box and use the same mechanism as already used for other blocks.

QTextEdit provides no means to analyze such more or less complicated thing as "style". For bold, italic and friends - it does provide. But not for style.

Thank you so much for making me completely sure that there are even several solutions for my problem!

Anyhow, please agree that it wouldn't be so bad if QTextEdit widget ITSELF provided us with some convenient means to do the thing, instead of being smart enough to convert almost all formatting tags to font settings...