[texworks] Alternate Editor Components? Was Re: Problem with line mangling

[Jonathan Kew]

On 7 Jul 2011, at 08:03, Charlie Sharpsteen wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 11:39 PM, Paul A Norman <paul.a.norman at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Here is the web site of the Qt editor component called QCodeEdit, it
> may be of no use as it mioghht bnow allow for text colouring ..
> 
> "QCodeEdit is a framework designed to make edition of source code easy
> for both users and developers.
> 
> "It is written in C++ using the Qt 4 framework which make it cross-platform.
> 
> "QCodeEdit has been designed for three main purposes : efficiency,
> flexibility and ease of use.
> 
> :Indeed QCodeEdit is much more lightweight and significantly faster
> than QTextEdit/QTextDocument. However it also has different goals and
> thus limitations. QCodeEdit is meant to work with source files and not
> any kind of rich text like QTextEdit handles so well."
> ...
> 
> http://qcodeedit.edyuk.org/?q=node/1
> 
> Paul
> 
> QScintilla may be an option as well if we are looking for a code editor framework:
> 
>     http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/software/qscintilla/intro
> 
> Pretty well battle-tested.

Either of these might be interesting to examine more closely. I'm wary, though, of components designed as "code editors" because in my experience they don't usually have strong Unicode support, including not just CJK ("double-byte languages", as they often used to be known in the pre-Unicode days), but also bidirectional scripts (Arabic, Hebrew, etc) and those with complex shaping and reordering behavior (Indic). While some of the "code editor" features would be very nice to have in a TeX editor, I don't want them to be at the expense of fundamental text editing behavior.

I note in the Scintilla docs that: "Scintilla does not properly support right-to-left languages like Arabic and Hebrew. While text in these languages may appear correct, it is not possible to interact with this text as is normal with other editing components."

JK