WYSIWYG in Android webview

Vic V picture Vic V · Jun 14, 2013 · Viewed 7.7k times · Source

I've been trying to offer a WYSIWYG HTML editor to my users, from inside my app. It doesn't have to be a fancy WYSIWYG. I just need basic functionality like Bold, Italic, Underline, images, link and some basic formatting (font size, colour, alignment). That should be enough.

The perfect solution would be an open source library, but I haven't been able to find one. So I googled around for a web-based editor that works on Android. I found Sceditor. This editor works great when I fire up my Android browser (Chrome beta). It SEEMS to work from my webview (see screenshot) as well, but it doesn't.

Sorry for the size!

As soon as I run the editor from within the app, most functionality stops working. The cursor jumps around randomly, I cannot edit existing text anymore and more weird stuff happens. Basically, it just doesn't work.

Question: How can I get this to work appropriately?

Thanks a LOT in advance!

Answer

CommonsWare picture CommonsWare · Jun 14, 2013

EditText is perfectly capable of displaying rich text. It's just that there's no easy way for users -- or even developers -- to really control that formatting. Hence, I've been poking off and on with a library to deal with this, offering a RichEditText drop-in replacement for EditText. It's still a work-in-progress, and I really need to spend more time on it in the not-too-distant future.