'Variables' in rich text

[williamclocksin]

I have started exploring RichTextFX. I am porting 56,000 lines of Objective-C that I wrote for NextStep in the 1990s to JavaFX, and need an editable styled text box in graphics documents (used for running headers and footers etc). I have multiple InlineCssTextArea in the document, with editor buttons in the GUI of the application. What I need now is to insert 'variables' such as page number, total number of pages, date and time etc into the styled areas. I am happy to do the coding to replace the variable with the appropriate value, but I would like to know a good way to represent variables in the styled area. It would be cool if CSS had something like -fx-variable:pagenum, but I don't think it does. Any suggestions?

[Jugen]

First off, cool project - hope it brings you much enjoyment and not too much frustration :-)

Second, in case you don't have it here's the JavaFX CSS reference page.
See Text, Shape, and Node for possible CSS options that you could use.

Third, you are right (as far as I know) JavaFX doesn't have -fx-variable:pagenum

Forth, my suggestion: Would a border or background of some kind around the variable maybe work ?
Note: if I remember correctly backgrounds are buggy, so try borders first if feasible. Then once that's working you could try adding/replacing it with a background if you want too.

[williamclocksin]

Thanks for the suggestion. I have time to experiment with the various ways to style variables. What the user will see is for example Page 5, and not Page <pagenum>, so it is a question of putting the variable in the styling string somehow and then substituting when the area is displayed. I would prefer not to change any code in RichTextFX itself. I just use the fat jar. Yes, this is a fun and challenging project. I moved from Objective-C to Java in 2000 with a job move. I prefer Java, With JavaFX I don't need to do much window management,and don't have to worry about recovering freed memory space. However, event handling is a pain because my Canvas is enclosed in a ScrollView, which (not documented) intercepts the arrow keys, and I anchor the Canvas with other nodes (such as RichTextFX areas), so I had to completely re-design the event handling so the right node gets the right events at the right time. Also, JavaFX does not correctly measure some fonts, so I have a mixture of FX font handling and AWT font handling in the same program.