Feature Reaquest - Increased Static Text functionality

Mloren · Post by **Mloren** » Tue Oct 05, 2010 11:20 am

There are two things you can't do with static text that are really bothering me:

1. You cannot click and drag over static text to highlight it so you can copy and paste it elsewhere.

2. you cannot set different colors within one piece of static text.

I am trying to use it for a chat window, and being able to copy text out of it would be handy and not being able to set different colors is very annoying.
I would like to have the speakers name in a different color to the text they say.

Doesn't look like there's a way to do this currently though.
Any chance of either of these being added?

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Tue Oct 05, 2010 1:14 pm

I'm not the GUI maintainer, but IMHO not. Different colors would bloat the API and text color syntax too much. And selectable text is often not desired in places where static text is used.
Just search for the chat console implementations that have been made in the past. Should work for your cases pretty well.

Sylence · Post by **Sylence** » Tue Oct 05, 2010 2:34 pm

I agree on the copy and paste. That's what edit boxes are made for.

But for the second point:
Maybe we could have some kind of parser that would allow use to add this functionality if we want. The built in one could just don't touch the text at all but if we want to we can exchange the parser with an own implementation where we could define our own syntax for coloring texts, switching fonts, and so on?

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Tue Oct 05, 2010 3:21 pm

Well, there have been such gui elements already, as mentioned. I'm not sure why they were not integrated into the engine, but I suppose that it was too specific and performance hungry. If there's a suggestion for a better integration it could be worth submitting a patch

greenya · Post by **greenya** » Tue Oct 05, 2010 4:06 pm

Mloren,

as a variant you can try to draw 2 separate IGUIStaticText objects: each with own color.
Next method allows to get width (in pixels) how much space the text (user name in your case) needs to be drawn, so you can draw second static text (user message in your case) right next to the previous text just by add an offset by X coord.

s32 irr::gui::IGUIStaticText::getTextWidth();

Returns the width of the current text, in the current font.
If the text is broken, this returns the width of the widest line.

(c) http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/docu/cl ... 1d4cba7e5d

Mloren · Post by **Mloren** » Mon Oct 11, 2010 12:56 am

hybrid wrote:And selectable text is often not desired in places where static text is used.

I can't imagine why you would ever want static text to not be selectable.
It always bugs me when a program brings up an error or other message box and you cant select the text to copy and paste it (eg to paste it into google to find out what the error means).

Sylence wrote:I agree on the copy and paste. That's what edit boxes are made for.

The problem is they can also always be edited. What if I want text that can be selected/copied but not altered by user.

It seems like either the static text should have an option to set it as selectable or the edit box should have an option to disable user altering.

Bate · Post by **Bate** » Mon Oct 11, 2010 6:07 am

Agreed.

IMHO Mloren is absolutely right -- I like to copy-paste everything as well.

puh · Post by **puh** » Mon Oct 11, 2010 9:07 am

Why you can't just use setEnabled function for IGUIEditBox for disable user altering?

CuteAlien · Post by **CuteAlien** » Mon Oct 11, 2010 9:26 am

Ok, as for colors: I guess that should rather be an own element.

But copying text would certainly be useful. I already have a bunch of other open patches for IGUIStaticText (mostly for scrolling), so when get to adding those I'll look into it.