Sneak Peek: Drag-n-drop, dialogs, more formats with the rich text editor in WinForms

Part of a series on the new features appearing in DXperience v2009.3. This time around let's delve into the myriad new features of the XtraRichEdit control. This is going to be a long one, sorry in advance for taxing your broadband connection...

First on the (alphabetical) list is drag and drop. We'll start off with an animated GIF showing drag-and-drop working from within the control. It works just as you'd expect: select some text, click within the selection and, without releasing the mouse button, drag the text to a new position and drop it there.

Next up in the same vein is dragging files into a rich text editor. First in this set of examples is dragging an OpenOffice file:

Second is dragging an RTF file:

And last, but not least, dragging a DOCX file.

Of course, drag-and-drop wouldn't be complete unless we could drag and drop rich text from, oh, say, Microsoft Word?

Now if you'd been paying attention there with the drag-and-drop images you'd have noticed something new, so this formal announcement won't be a surprise: we now support the OpenOffice format:

Another format we've added support for is the WordprocessingML format (a.k.a. the Word 2003 XML format):

Third on our big list of new features are some essential standard dialogs. (And surely it goes without saying that all the new dialogs use the current application skin.) First up is the standard bullets and numbering dialog:

Of course, you really want the ability to customize the bullets:

And the numbered list as well:

Having done those two, we also added the ability to customize the numbered levels used in outlines:

Another standard dialog I've been waiting for is the Insert Symbol dialog (warning: we threw in a gratuitous Comic Sans reference in the image):

Fourth in our big list of features is something else you may have spotted already: support for hyperlinks. This comes with its own standard Edit Hyperlink form:

Once you have a hyperlink in your document, you can hover over it and get a standard tooltip. Also the context menu shows editing actions you can make with a hyperlink:

A very nifty hyperlink-related feature we added is the ability to run a "macro" as the target of a link. A picture is worth a thousand words (and an animated one at least double that): here clicking on the hyperlink ">>Deadline Date<<" shows a form that allows the user to set a date. The result of that form replaces the hyperlink text.

Finally, another feature you should have noticed by now if you are already a user of our WinForms rich text editor: rulers. Note the rulers support showing and adding margins, indents, and tabs.

As you have seen, some remarkable new features for the XtraRichEdit control for v2009.3.

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