VCL Rich Edit Components
- 3 minutes to read
The Rich Edit UI control and the Document Server component allow you to generate and edit rich text documents in different formats.
Rich Edit Control
The VCL Rich Edit control allows you to create applications with a user experience inspired by Microsoft Word®.
Automatic Ribbon/Toolbar UI Generation
You can create a word processor application with a fully-functional Ribbon or Toolbar UI in a few clicks:
Refer to the following topics for details:
Document Server
The VCL Document Server is a non-visual component designed to generate, edit, and convert documents without user interaction (in a console application, for instance). This component uses the same document model as the Rich Edit control but requires no visual libraries.
Refer to the following topics for details:
- An Introduction to the Rich Edit API
- The TdxRichEditDocumentServer class description
Supported Document Elements
- Bulleted, numbered, and multilevel lists
- Bookmarks and hyperlinks
- Floating text boxes
- Inline and floating images
- Tables
- Headers and footers
Format Documents
- Format Document Text
- You can change format attributes of any text fragment. You can also create styles that set multiple format attributes simultaneously. Use styles to apply the same formatting to different parts of a document.
- Change the Page Layout
- You can apply settings such as page orientation, paper kind, and margins. You can also divide a page into columns and insert page breaks, or apply separate layout settings to the first page of your document and hide its header and footer to start numbering from the second page.
- Build a Table of Contents
- The control can build a table of contents based on document headers or embedded object labels. Ctrl+Click on a table entry navigates to the corresponding position in a document.
Refer to the following topics for details:
Mail Merge
Rich Edit components can generate documents based on a template with value placeholders. You can connect an external data source to populate placeholders with numeric values, text, and images.
Refer to the following topic for details: Mail Merge.
Supported Document Formats
VCL Rich Edit components allow you to import and export documents in the following formats:
- Office OpenXML Document (DOCX)
- Rich Text Format (RTF)
- Microsoft Word® Binary Document Format (DOC)
- HyperText Markup Language (HTML)
- Plain text (TXT)
Refer to the following topics for details:
HTML Support Limitations
Rich Edit components have no web browser or HTML editor functionality because they do not work with HTML tags directly. HTML import routines interpret tags in a source document and build an internal document model according to the current import settings.
HTML import and export routines support only a limited subset of the modern HTML standard; therefore, imported and exported documents may look different compared to corresponding source documents.