WYSIWYG text editor in Java

Question

I'd like to collect all WYSIWYG text editors for Java here.

Some rules for entries:

• There must be a link to the project/product
• You must state whether it's open source or commercial
• Is it possible to extend the editor (add new features like a "violet centered sudoku")? Is that simple or complex?
• Does it come with lots of features (fancy character and paragraph styles with online spell checking for several languages in the same document) or just the basics (bold, italics, no underline)?
• List important dependencies (does it run on bare Java with Swing? SWT? MacOS?)
• Your personal opinion

This list should help developers determine which editor to choose. I'm not looking for "the best" but more "what's there".

Answer 1

OpenOffice's Writer

Can be embedded in Java using the OOoBean. The original code runs under Swing but you can make it work under SWT, too, using the AWT/SWT Bridge (example code).

The project is open source (LGPL). The code is OS dependent but there are versions available for all major OSs (Windows, Linux, MacOS and Solaris are supported on the project's site but you can download the source and compile it for others, as well).

Since the underlying product is a full blown office application, it offers all the features you might want (fancy styles, online spell checking in different languages, embedding pictures, flow text around pictures, you name it).

The drawback is that you must have OpenOffice installed; in fact, the editor is not part of Java but it's a remote process which just renders in your Java app's window. This means that start up time is quite noticeable and performance can be sluggish. Also handling is sometimes "odd". It takes some configuration to get rid of additional borders and unwanted document pagination.

Because of this, the editor is not really extendable from Java. You will either have to write code in C++ or using OOo's own built-in language. What you can do is you can register listeners in the document and you have full access to the underlying model for the document. This way, you can hook into the important parts and modify the behavior but this often feels like performing keyhole surgery.

My conclusion: If OO has the features you need, this might be the most simple way to get what you need. If you need a lot of customization, you'll fight an upstream battle against the framework's defaults.

Answer 2

Simply HTML

• its GPLed
• have no idea how easy it is to extend it
• doesn't support spell checking, but has tables, lists.
• Based on Swing, needs Java 1.4 and optionally Java Help
• I didn't used it as a programmer - just as an end user, it has some quirks - like no multilevel list's or tables that are less than great but is OK.
• Plus is it gives you HTML, so its is easy to embed results of processing into other components.

Answer 3

RSyntaxTextArea

I've used this component and it works well. It is LGPL and it is based on javax.swing.text package (javax.swing.text.EditorKit). Since it is a Swing component it can be integrated in your application in a few lines of code :

RSyntaxTextArea textArea = new RSyntaxTextArea();
textArea.setSyntaxEditingStyle(SyntaxConstants.SYNTAX_STYLE_JAVA);
RTextScrollPane sp = new RTextScrollPane(textArea);

Answer 4

Using an HTML WYSIWYG editor and the SWT browser component (see the snippets for examples). Options:

• SWT Composer
• EPF Rich Text
• richhtml4eclipse (based on TinyMCE)
• SWT Browser Widget to render a TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor

Pro:

• Lots of options due to HTML
• Supports HTML as the native format (so no unusual problems when you need to save the documents somewhere or modify them, unlike, say, the native Word format).
• Working with fonts, colors, images is simple since you don't have to manage the resources yourself. The browser component will do it for you

Contra:

• The solution is platform dependent. Tests with richhtml4eclipse showed a different behavior on Windows XP (IE) and Mac OSX (Safari)
• If there is a problem, users will have to switch to the HTML code view and fix it themselves.
• Good luck with content assist, code completion, spell checking, folding or annotations.
• Adding special features will either force you to do keyhole surgery through the pretty simply API
• With many of these editors, performance isn't that great, especially with large documents.
• Depends on SWT.

Source: Lösungen für einen SWT Rich Text Editor

Answer 5

Rich Text Viewer

Pro:

• Offers spell checking, code completion, undo/redo, auto indent, and most other features you'll expect (see here)
• Extensible

Contra:

• Depends on SWT
• No support for tables

Answer 6

docx4all

docx4all is a cross platform WYSIWYG editor for docx files, using Java Swing and JavaFX Script. Runs as an applet or application. See http://dev.plutext.org/trac/docx4all/wiki/FeatureSet

open source or commercial? See http://dev.plutext.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=209

Requires Java 6.

Answer 7

JWebEngine

I recommend JWebEngine. It is the only one that I know that passes the ACID1 browser test and the mail-acid test. Most other Java HTML editors are based on the javax.swing.text.html.HTMLDocument and have all the same bugs. The support of CSS is very poor with HTMLDocument. JWebEngine has very good support for viewing HTML with CSS.

• Link to the website. There are also online samples.
• Commercial license
• It is very simple to extend. The vendor is using it for many different things like editor, HTML printing engine, showing custom placeholders, etc. There is no problem with the visibility of classes like with the Sun HTMDocument.
• It based on javax.swing.text.JEditorPane or javax.swing.text.JTextPane and you can use it together with third party tools like the spell checker JOrtho.
• It is pure Java and runs on all platform with Java SE 5 or higher. It also run in non-signed applets.

Answer 8

Have a look at JWord

• It's commercial
• Lots of features (tables, paging, H/F, columns layout, wmf, svg, copy-paste, RTF, ODT, HTML export)
• royalty-free
• pure Java-Swing (1.6)
• extensible (based on Swing Text API)