Microsoft Word has a dialog box that enables end users to insert symbols using different symbol fonts in to their current document.
This sample application shows how to build such a dialog for your TX Text Control based applications.
The concept is not difficult, but the implementation is a little tricky, especially if you are doing it for the first time.
First of all, we simply fill an ArrayList with all characters from KeyCode 0 to 255.
For a As Integer = 0 To 255
mySymbols.Add(Chr(a))
NextThen we create a Label control for every character in the ArrayList. These labels are placed side-by-side, so that they look like a grid.
Each Label gets one character code from the ArrayList and the font which is selected in the Combobox.
For Each symbol As String In mySymbols
Dim newBox As New System.Windows.Forms.Label
newBox.Font = smallFont
newBox.Text = symbol
AddHandler newBox.Click, AddressOf SelectEvent
AddHandler newBox.DoubleClick, AddressOf Selected
Me.Panel1.Controls.Add(newBox)
NextAdditionally, we attach an event handler to every inserted Label control. On the Click event, we display the current symbol in a bigger font. If the user double clicks on a symbol, the current character is inserted into TX Text Control.
tx.Selection.FontName = curSymbolBox.Font.Name
tx.Selection.Text = curSymbolBox.TextAdditionally, we show in the sample how to use a Singleton pattern to ensure that only one instance of the dialog is open. Generally, you would use the ShowDialog() method of a form, but we would like to open a dialog and be able to edit the content of the main form.
The minimum requirements for this sample application are TX Text Control .NET for Windows Forms trial version and Visual Studio .NET 2003.
This code snippet sample illustrates how to build an Microsoft Word like symbol dialog box to insert different symbols into the current document.
TX Text Control .NET for Windows Forms 16.0
Visual Basic .NET (Visual Studio 2003)
tx_sample_dotnet_symbol.zip [11.87 KB]
April 29, 2005
