RichEdit 9 Additions
Six years have past since the post RichEdit 8 Feature Additions and a lot has happened in between. Along the way, several versions have shipped, but we might as well call the current one RichEdit 9, This covers RichEdit up through Office 2019 and includes some features of more recent Office 365 versions. The latter versions are shipped almost every month with fixes and improvements and, hopefully, no regressions! Much of the new functionality is described in posts, so I point to them as well as mention other improvements.
Excel has switched to RichEdit 9 both for in-cell editing and formula-bar editing. This switch required numerous Excel-specific additions to RichEdit in order to maintain Excel’s existing behavior. Most notably, a lot of effort was spent on the ruby text feature. Many changes were small enough to be named bug fixes, although some added functionality. Substantial effort has been devoted to keeping up with Unicode, particularly with emoji, but also with new scripts.
Cross Platform
Perhaps the most impressive change is that RichEdit 9 ships in many forms: Win32, Universal, Mac, iOS, Android, and server! To support all these versions, we write unit tests for all new features. The extensive test infrastructure for older features runs on Windows, and some of those tests have been converted to unit tests that run on other platforms. Fortunately, the implementations of most features are platform independent and can be tested adequately on Windows alone. Part of porting RichEdit to other platforms depended on porting LineServices and DirectWrite to those platforms as well.
The remainder of this post has links to features that have shipped. Please click on the links that you’re interested in.
RichEdit Property Sets
RichEdit has many character-format properties, most of which are documented for ITextFont2 and CHARFORMAT2. Nevertheless, the OpenType specification defines many more character-format properties called OpenType features consisting of a 32-bit identifier (id) and a 32-bit value. For example, the Gabriola font has stylistic set 6, which displays “Gabriola is graceful” as
Variable fonts are the latest addition to the OpenType specification. RichEdit 9 supports both OpenType features and variable fonts. December 22, 2018
UI Automation Math Text Support
Microsoft products expose their contents for accessibility purposes via a set of interfaces known as UI Automation (UIA). Currently UIA has no special support for math text. Either the assistive technology program (AT) has to figure out if math is involved or the application has to return math-specific speech text as done with Office math. RichEdit 9 supports two ways for an AT to retrieve math zones in a specific format, e.g., MathML. November 16, 2018
Converting Microsoft Equation Editor Objects to OfficeMath
As discussed in the post Editing equations created using the Microsoft Equation Editor, the Microsoft Equation Editor 3.0 (MEE) was removed from Office installations because it has security problems and no maintenance. Microsoft doesn’t have access to the MEE source code and MEE’s author, Design Science, doesn’t maintain it, instead offering the more powerful, upward-compatible MathType. Users can invoke the converter built into RichEdit 9 in Word and PowerPoint to convert MEE and MathType math objects to OfficeMath. August 31, 2018
RichEdit Animated GIFs
The post RichEdit 8.0 Image Support describes how RichEdit supports popular image formats, such as jpeg’s, png’s and GIF’s. RichEdit 8.1 added direct support for jpeg’s and png’s in the Rich Text Format (RTF) instead of using RichEdit’s proprietary blob format. Even so, GIFs were treated as second-class images in two ways. First, they were converted to png’s when persisted in RTF. Since png’s are limited to a single frame, only the initial frame of a multiframe GIF was saved. Second, only the initial frame was displayed, so the animated GIFs that are seen frequently on the web and in texting programs weren’t animated. This post describes how RichEdit 9 fixes both problems. February 21, 2018
LaTeX Math in Office
For a while now it’s been possible to switch Word’s math input mode from UnicodeMath to LaTeX. We didn’t advertise this highly requested feature since it needed more work. We fixed most of the problems and this post describes how you can use [La]TeX as a math input method in Word, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook. The LaTeX converters are shared code built into RichEdit 9. July 30, 2017
Microsoft Office Math Speech
Microsoft Office math-aware applications can now speak math in over 18 different languages! Try it out with native math zones in Word by enabling Narrator (type Windows+Ctrl+Enter) and navigate a math zone as described in the post Speaking of math… There are two math-speech granularities: coarse-grained (navigate by words), which speaks math expressions fluently in a natural language, and fine-grained (navigate by characters), which explains the content at the insertion point (IP) in enough detail to enable editing. The math speech engine is shared code built into RichEdit 9. February 27, 2017
Nemeth Braille—the first math linear format
The 6-dot Nemeth braille encoding was created by Abraham Nemeth for mathematical and scientific notation and is general enough to encode almost all Microsoft Office math notation. RichEdit 9 supports Nemeth math braille input and output. This capability hasn’t yet been integrated into Office apps. July 31, 2016
RichEdit Language Tag Handling
For years, many applications have used the locale ID (LCID) to identify the language and locale for text and other data. For example since 1997 (RichEdit 2.0), RichEdit’s character formatting has included CHARFORMAT2::lcid. The LCID can, in fact, describe most language/locale combinations in use as far as text is concerned. However, the more general BCP-47 language tag is based on international standards and it can describe virtually any language/locale combination and it can include additional subtags such as for script and private-use. Since myriad existing documents use LCIDs, text engines still need to support LCIDs. This post describes how RichEdit 9 supports both properties gracefully in a way that doesn’t require tearing existing programs apart. October 19, 2015
Color Fonts
The popularity of emoji symbols has encouraged a variety of technological innovations, notably fonts with multicolor characters. This is different from just having text color, which is described in RichEdit Colors. While some colored glyphs were part of the original Japanese emoji standards, colored glyphs got much more elegant when Apple introduced its proprietary color emoji font. This post describes how RichEdit 9 displays text formatted with Microsoft color fonts. September 24, 2015
Posts for previous versions
Here are some posts that describe older RichEdit versions and history.
RichEdit 8 Feature Additions
The time has come to summarize the features added in RichEdit 8, which shipped with Windows 8 and Office 2013. Since so much was added, I wrote a number of blog posts over the last twelve months about the larger RichEdit 8 features. The present post lists those features and then describes some smaller features… September 7, 2013
Some RichEdit History
A couple of comments have raised the question of people outside Microsoft using the various versions of RichEdit. Specifically, Teis Johansen asks, “Just to be sure. Can I redistribute RichEdit 6.0 with my application?” and Kyle Alons asks, “So what’s the point of listing these features without documenting how to use them? Just to make… October 19, 2006
RichEdit Versions Update to 7.0
The original RichEdit Versions post covered RichEdit versions 1.0 through 6.0, since 6.0 was the latest version at the time. RichEdit 7.0 will ship with Office 2010, so here’s an update describing what that version adds. Most additions involve math editing/display and play a central role in the math features of OneNote 2010, PowerPoint 2010,… September 5, 2009
Math Handwriting Recognition
Starting with Windows 7, Windows includes a cool applet called the Math Input Panel. This applet lets you enter mathematical text using a pen or a mouse. It recognizes what you enter and displays the result using a special private version of RichEdit 6. It also lets you copy the results to Word, Mathematica, or any… May 6, 2009
RichEdit Versions 1.0 through 3.0
Digging through old doc files, I ran across the following summary of RichEdit up through Version 3.0. It’s more detailed than my post on RichEdit Versions, so it might be of interest to history buffs, anyhow. And it does describe the riched20.dll that still ships with Windows, mostly for purposes of backward compatibility. I wrote… January 12, 2010
RichEdit versions
Recurring questions are what RichEdit’s are available, where they are installed and what features they have. A relatively new question is which RichEdit’s support the new Office math editing and display. So this post attempts to answer these questions. To answer the last question first, only RichEdit 6.0 has the Office math facility, although RichEdit… October 13, 2006