The incredibly awesome AvalonEdit WPF TextEditor control seems to lack an important feature, or at least i can't figure it out. Given an offset and a length, highlight that portion in the TextDocument with a HighlightColor. Simple, right?
Apprentely not. I've RTFM, and the documentation on "Syntax Highlighting" confused me even more. Someone else asked the same question in the SharpDevelop forums, and i'm afraid i can't make sense of Herr Grunwald's answer.
Here's my attempt, using the DocumentHighlighter class (of course it doesn't work):
textEditor1.Text = "1234567890";
HighlightingColor c = new HighlightingColor() { FontWeight = FontWeights.ExtraBold };
DocumentHighlighter dh = new DocumentHighlighter(textEditor1.Document, new HighlightingRuleSet());
HighlightedLine hl = dh.HighlightLine(1);
hl.Sections.Add(new HighlightedSection() { Color = c, Offset = 1, Length = 3 });
Thank you for helping!
Did you see this in this article - it seems to be exactly what are you asking for:
public class ColorizeAvalonEdit : DocumentColorizingTransformer
{
protected override void ColorizeLine(DocumentLine line)
{
int lineStartOffset = line.Offset;
string text = CurrentContext.Document.GetText(line);
int start = 0;
int index;
while ((index = text.IndexOf("AvalonEdit", start)) >= 0) {
base.ChangeLinePart(
lineStartOffset + index, // startOffset
lineStartOffset + index + 10, // endOffset
(VisualLineElement element) => {
// This lambda gets called once for every VisualLineElement
// between the specified offsets.
Typeface tf = element.TextRunProperties.Typeface;
// Replace the typeface with a modified version of
// the same typeface
element.TextRunProperties.SetTypeface(new Typeface(
tf.FontFamily,
FontStyles.Italic,
FontWeights.Bold,
tf.Stretch
));
});
start = index + 1; // search for next occurrence
} } }
It highlights word AvalonEdit with bold.
Some background info:
AvalonEdit is a code editor, not a rich text editor. There is no such thing as "highlight a portion of the document" - the document only stores plain text.
Highlighting is computed on-demand, only for the lines currently in view. If you want custom highlighting, you need to add a step to the highlighting computation - this is what the ColorizeAvalonEdit
class in the example posted by mzabsky is doing.
You need to create a custom ColorizingTransformer to do that. The above example is actually highlighting a specific word. Still, you can change it a little bit to to colorize or highlight a portion.
I used Avalon TextEditor for my Console+ project (which is in a very primitive stage at the moment)
public class OffsetColorizer : DocumentColorizingTransformer
{
public int StartOffset { get; set; }
public int EndOffset { get; set; }
protected override void ColorizeLine(DocumentLine line)
{
if (line.Length == 0)
return;
if (line.Offset < StartOffset || line.Offset > EndOffset)
return;
int start = line.Offset > StartOffset ? line.Offset : StartOffset;
int end = EndOffset > line.EndOffset ? line.EndOffset : EndOffset;
ChangeLinePart(start, end, element => element.TextRunProperties.SetForegroundBrush(Brushes.Red));
}
}
And you can add the colorizer to the editor by adding it to LineTransformers collection.
tbxConsole.TextArea.TextView.LineTransformers.Add(_offsetColorizer);
I know this is a pretty old question, but I thought I would share my solution. I am not sure if this solution has been implemented into AvalonEdit, since this question was originally answered, but I find the OffsetColorizer class doesn't actually select the line: it just changes the line's background colour.
My solution is as follows:
textEditor.SelectionStart = offset;
textEditor.SelectionLength = length;
However, this can be extended further like so:
public void SelectText(int offset, int length)
{
//Get the line number based off the offset.
var line = textEditor.Document.GetLineByOffset(offset);
var lineNumber = line.LineNumber;
//Select the text.
textEditor.SelectionStart = offset;
textEditor.SelectionLength = length;
//Scroll the textEditor to the selected line.
var visualTop = textEditor.TextArea.TextView.GetVisualTopByDocumentLine(lineNumber);
textEditor.ScrollToVerticalOffset(visualTop);
}
I find that this solution works better is that rather than just colouring the line, it actually selects it: meaning it can be copied using Ctrl+C.
I Hope this helps people in the future.