Chapter 9. Text
This chapter covers
- An overview of the text system
- Displaying text
- Working with fonts
- Understanding input method editors
- Moving text to and from the clipboard
- Entering and editing plain and rich text
Most applications you write will display or manipulate text at some point. Even many games have text input requirements for signup, registration, or to log a high score. Media players often have rolling commentary by other viewers and the ability to add to the social aspects of what you’re watching. In short, working with text is important.
For as long as computers have been around and attached to video displays or teletypes, the display of text has been an important aspect of user interaction. Silverlight includes great support for displaying text, with a number of options that control formatting and other aspects of the display.
Of course, if all that the platform supported were the display of text, we’d be pretty limited in the types of applications we build. In addition to its display capabilities, Silverlight includes first-class support for editing text, both plain and rich text formats.
If you can enter and edit text, you may find yourself wanting to copy and paste it between various applications. Silverlight also includes facilities to enable programmatic manipulation of the clipboard to share data within the same application and across applications.