JDocEditor

An Eclipse plugin that contributes a WYSIWYG JavaDoc editor to the JDT platform.

A nearly complete rewrite, now using pure SWT controls to achieve faster start-up, more efficient run-time operation, and lower operating resource requirements.

The key change is complete replacement of the SWT_AWT bridge and Swing HtmlEditorKit controls with a StyledText-based HTML WYSIWYG editor control, with supporting CSS query and spelling correction engines.

Other architectural changes include relaxing reliance on the Content Outline View and removes direct reliance on Eclipse internal packages. JDocEditor now properly recognizes navigation events from the current active JDT editor as well as the Outline, and the Outline is not required to be open to use JDocEditor. This version should be fully compatibile with JDT-based Eclipse derivatives, such as WebSphere.

Features

• A full WYSIWYG JavaDoc content editor implemented in an Eclipse view and seamlessly linked to the active JDT editor.
• Provides a full complement of word processing functions appropriate for composing and revising JavaDoc content
• Implements a real-time spelling checker for JavaDoc text.
• Supports editing of package comments as ordinary JavaDoc.
• Comment editing is bidirectionally linked, in realtime.
• New JavaDoc comment blocks can be automatically generated, updated, and repaired from the right-click menu.
• Class, constructor, and method signature types are hyperlinked to the full JavaDoc pages. JDocEditor has automatic access to the Eclipse platform JavaDoc and can be configured to transparently access any JavaDoc repository, local or remote, such as JDocs, and present the JavaDoc pages in the platform help browser.

Screen Shot

• Left pane is a full WYSIWYG, rich content editor with real-time link to the JDT editor.
• Right pane presents the current package, constructor, field, method signature with active hyperlinks that will invoke the platform help system to display corresponding JavaDoc API pages.
• Toolbar can be positioned above or below the view panes.

Development State

1. Caution: The current verison has undergone only limited real-world testing. Bugs and regressions no doubt exist. So, be careful and please report any unexpected operation.
2. Relies on a number of new subpackages that also have had limited real-world testing.
3. Still, gives every appearence of being quite stable.
4. Various preference and repair features have not been fully re-implemented yet.
5. Currently not guarranteed to be able to accept the HTML coding that it produces. Future verisons will include an Html cleaning function.

Use

Should be intuitive:

• Any valid selection event in the current, active JDT editor will automatically load the JDocEditor with the corresponding JavaDoc content. The Eclipse Content Outline View may also be used to navigate and load JDocEditor with content. The Outline View is not required to be open.
• Right-click menus provide comment correction, tag insertion and repair, and spelling correction options.
• Various shift and control key combinations, standard for the StyledText control, are available (Keystrokes).

Installation & Requirements

To install:

1. extract the zip file to the Eclipse plugins directory.
2. copy out the us_US.zip dictionary file to a convenient directory -- the personal dictionary will be created in the same directory.
3. adjust the JDocEditor3 preferences to point to the dictionary file.

Requirements:

• Eclipse 3.4M5+ with JDT installed
• JDK 1.5+ as the Eclipse VM

Subprojects

JDocEditor3 is built using a variety of subpackages. Some of the custom packages include:

• StyledHtml: a WYSIWYG Html editor extension of the standard SWT StyledText control.
• CssQuery: a pure Java implementation of a CSS query engine
• SwtSpell: an SWT spell checker using OpenOffice dictionaries
• SwtUtil: includes a caching resource manager that can be used stand-alone or transparently integrate in a plugin or RCP application.

Faq

Check the JDocEditor Faq for preference settings, answers to common problems, and other helpful tips (A few answers may no longer be accurate).