The RICHED Sample

You create a rich edit control by using the CreateWindow or CreateWindowEx function, specifying the RichEdit window class. Because the common control library registers this window class, you must call the InitCommonControls function to ensure that the library is loaded before creating the control. To use rich edit controls in your application, you must link with the COMCTL32.LIB library. If you are writing your application in C, you must include the COMMCTRL.H header file. Applications must also include the RICHEDIT.H header file, in which rich edit controls are defined. Note that four of the window styles you can use with multiline edit controls cannot be used with rich edit controls: ES_LOWERCASE, ES_PASSWORD, ES_OEMCONVERT, and ES_UPPERCASE.

To explore the rich edit control, I wrote a sample called RICHED. (Do I lose points for uncreative sample names?) The design goals for RICHED were a bit more challenging than those of my previous samples:

• To provide a rich edit control with a toolbar that mimics the Windows 95 WordPad accessory
• To allow the user to format characters as boldface, italic, or underlined (or as any combination of these three attributes)
• To allow the user to change the typeface and the point size of
  the font
• To allow the user to left-align, right-align, or center paragraphs or selected text
• To support word-break and line-break procedures
• To provide serialization
• To support drag-and-drop operations
• To support printing

The initialization code in the RICHED sample needed to perform the following tasks:

• Create the toolbar and the combo boxes on the toolbar
• Create the rich edit control
• Enumerate the available fonts, and fill the typeface and point size combo boxes with the font information
• Initialize drag and drop

Figure 5-1 offers a sneak peek at the main screen that appears when you start the RICHED sample.

Figure 5-1.

The RICHED sample.