The new Modern Comments facility aims to give a similar commenting experience on the web and in native apps. On the desktop in Windows and the Mac, the editor component is RichEdit. The facility is a work in progress, and it is getting very nice. This post gives some background on incorporating RichEdit into the Microsoft 365 commenting experience....

RichEdit and Word have had the most elaborate autoformatting ever since Office 2007, namely math formula auto-buildup. A UnicodeMath expression builds up into OfficeMath as soon as it is unambiguous. Word and other programs have also had less ambitious autoformatting since late in the last century. Such functionality includes auto conversion of som...

In Word, PowerPoint, OneNote and RichEdit, you can enclose text in a rectangle by putting the text into a math “boxed formula” object. To try this out, type alt+= to enter a math zone and then \rect(a+b)<space>. This displays as as The “\rect(a+b)” is the UnicodeMath representation of this boxed formula. In MathML, the boxed formula object i...

Microsoft Word 2007 and RichEdit 6.0 introduced the native Office math facility. PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote followed suit in 2010, and Mac Word followed in 2011. But ironically the native math facility didn’t have a recognizable name. “Microsoft Equation Editor” (MEE) seemed natural, but that's the name of the Design Science math editor that sh...

A few years ago, I visited two very interesting countries, Vietnam and South Korea. Being actively involved in writing software (mostly RichEdit) for editing the world’s scripts, I was naturally fascinated to see Vietnamese and Korean text displayed in profusion. The Vietnamese and Korean scripts were designed with a common purpose in mind: enable ...

The new Windows 11 Notepad uses RichEdit and runs on up-to-date Windows 11 installations. In addition to a Windows 11 look with rounded corners and a dark-theme option, the new Notepad includes several standard RichEdit editing enhancements, such as Alt+x for entering Unicode characters, Ctrl+} for toggling between matching brackets/parentheses, mu...

Do you know that Unicode includes the fraction characters ↉ ½ ⅓ ¼ ⅕ ⅙ ⅐ ⅛ ⅑ ⅒ ⅔ ⅖ ¾ ⅗ ⅜ ⅘ ⅚ ⅞? Well thanks to existing character standards, ½ ⅓ ¼ ⅕ ⅙ ⅛ ⅔ ⅖ ¾ ⅗ ⅜ ⅘ ⅚ ⅞ were added in Unicode 1.1 in 1993, and ↉ ⅐ ⅑ ⅒ were added in Unicode 5.2 in 2009. Programs like Microsoft Word have an “Autoformat as you type” option to convert the linear fractions...

In slide presentations and elsewhere, it can be handy to have math text color and math background color. In fact, Presentation MathML has the attributes “mathcolor” and “mathbackground”. This post describes the operators Noah Doersing added to his UnicodeMathML implementation to enter text and background color using UnicodeMath. I subsequently adde...

Word and RichEdit have stories, but you won’t find their story’s definition in a dictionary. Their story is an object that stores rich text in computer memory. Rich text consists of Unicode plain text, associated character and paragraph formatting, and embedded objects such as images. Such a story can contain the narrative of a traditional story, b...

Sometimes you need a text box that cues the user to type something in, such as, “Start a conversation”. As soon as the user types something, the cue text vanishes, and the user sees what the user typed. If the user deletes all the text, the cue text reappears. Such a text box is called a place-holder control. The Microsoft 365 RichEdit has such a c...