Back in July, our staff needed to tweak TurtleSoft’s printed forms so we could test the new accounting software in daily use. It meant adding more features to Custom Layouts. Every time work seemed to be finished there, something new came up. There have been many “last on the list” items.
Rich text is last on the list (so far……..). It’s what you see here: text with bold, italic, font changes, and other formatting.
The good news is, rich text was easy to add to our multi-line fields. One line of code, setAcceptRichText(true); was enough to turn it on.
The bad news is, Qt does it in a weird way. From the name, we figured they’d use RTF (rich text format). It’s a simple markup language developed by Microsoft in the 1980s. RTF is supported by MS Office and many other apps, and it would be perfect for our accounting software.
However, Qt uses HTML, instead. It’s probably a wise choice for the long term, since everything seems to be web-based these days. But HTML is way overkill for an accounting app.
For one thing, their approach is bulky. Every field has at least 465 bytes of hidden markup text: even if it’s empty. Basically, they set up a whole web page. Actual content can easily have more hidden HTML tags than text. RTF is much more compact than that.
Also, Qt only has partial support for HTML and CSS. It ignores php and JavaScript completely. So, text pasted from web pages may lose some details. Pasting from RTF has similar problems: some things don’t make it over because the tags are different.
Even worse, there’s no way to edit formats while inside our new accounting software. Text must be created in a word processor or other app that handles HTML, then pasted in. You can’t just type in rich text, nor can you change it after it’s there.
Qt does have classes to set up a rich text editor and/or an HTML viewer. But they’re complex, and meant for whole scrolling windows, not database fields. A mini text-formatting bar would be nice, but Qt doesn’t have one. Our staff does not want to program one from scratch. It’s a several-month project.
For contracts and spec-writing, HTML may be worth the downsides. Elsewhere, probably not. So, rich text is turned off by default in the new software. Custom Layouts has a checkbox to turn it on, for fields where you really want the fancier formats.
Rich text is slightly nifty.
Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com
