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What exactly can the Rich Edit Control do anyway?

The Rich Edit control (named TRichEdit in Delphi 2.x+) introduced as a part of Windows 95 common controls can only support a subset of the Rich Text Format (RTF) codes. Which means, if you save a file as a RTF file in Microsoft Word (for example), you may not be able to view that file the same way depending on which codes you used in the original file. On the other hand, you may be able to see some of the tags, but won't be able to save or modify them within the Rich Edit control itself.

The good news is that the Rich Edit control supports majority of the codes making it a light weight control which most programs can use without worrying about the missing tags or codes.

Here's a list of RTF codes Win32 Rich Edit control can understand:

- * : \\ \n \r _ { | } ~ ansi b bin blue bullet cb cell cf colortbl cpg deff deflang deftab dibitmap dn dy emdash endash f fbidi fchars fcharset fdecor fi field fldinst fldrslt fmodern fnil fontemb fontfile fonttbl footer footerf

footerl footerr footnote froman fs fscript fswiss ftech ftncn ftnsep ftnsepc green header headerf headerl headerr horzdoc hr i info intbl lang lchars ldblquote li line lquote ltrch ltrdoc ltrmark ltrpar mac macpict margl marglsxn margr margrsxn min mo nocwrap nooverflow nosupersub nowwrap objautlink

objclass objcropb objcropl objcropr objcropt objdata object objemb objh objicemb objlink objname objpub objscalex objscaley objsetsize objsub objw par pard pc pca piccropb piccropl piccropr piccropt pich pichgoal picscalex picscaley pict picw picwgoal plain pmmetafile pn pnindent pnlvlblt pntext pntxta pntxtb protect qc ql qr

rdblquote red result revauth revised ri row rquote rtf rtlch rtldoc rtlmark rtlpar sec sect sectd strike stylesheet sub super tab tb tc tx ul uldash uldashd uldashdd ulhair ulnone ulth ulwave up v vertdoc wbitmap wbmbitspixel wbmplanes wbmwidthbytes wmetafile xe yr zwj zwnj

If you must have a control that can support all the RTF codes, you may want to consider a third party control or using an OLE control such as Microsoft Word.