Introduction

RichTextBox is an ActiveX control that wraps the RichEdit50W window class. It is optimized for Visual Basic 6.0, but should also work in any other environment that supports COM controls.

Basics

The control superclasses the native rich text box window class of Windows: RichEdit50W. Although I tried to wrap all features of this window class (status: Windows 10), some things may be missing. In these cases you usually may use the Win32 API and handle the control as a native rich text box window. One of my goals was it to create a rich text box control that may be controlled via API as well as via the classes that I implemented.

Requirements

RichTextBox Unicode runs on the following operating systems:

Windows XP (SP3 or later)
Windows Server 2003 (SP2 or later)
Windows Vista (SP2 or later)
Windows Server 2008 (SP2 or later)
Windows 7 (SP1 or later)
Windows Server 2008 R2 (SP1 or later)
Windows 8
Windows Server 2012
Windows 8.1
Windows Server 2012 R2
Windows 10
Windows Server 2016
Windows Server 2019
Systems supported by Wine (Wine is a Win32 subsystem for alternative operating systems) - limited support
ReactOS (a free Windows XP clone) - limited support

Some features have additional requirements which are mentioned in the affected feature's documentation.
Limited support means, that I won't invest much work to support those systems. If a feature works on a system tagged with "limited support" - fine; if it does not and it's easy to fix, I'll fix it, but if it's difficult to fix, I probably won't fix it. Also I will test the control much less on those systems.

Support

There's no entitlement to support. Period. However, you have good chances to get help if you post your questions on GitHub or in the forums.
Also the project is open source, so feel free to have a look at the source code. You may modify it, but please consider sharing your changes with the rest of the world.

License

     MIT License

     Copyright (c) 2018-2019 Timo Kunze

     Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
     of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
     in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
     to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
     copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
     furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

     The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
     copies or substantial portions of the Software.

     THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
     IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
     FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
     AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
     LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
     OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
     SOFTWARE.

Acknowledgements

Thanks go to:

Wine Headquarters, because Wine helped me a lot on understanding how Windows is working.
Microsoft, for ATL, WTL and Visual Studio - great libraries and a great IDE
Geoff Chappell, for his website about undocumented Win32 API stuff.
Igor Tandetnik, for his great help on learning ATL and WTL
Dimitri van Heesch, for Doxygen
Nikos Bozinis, for his awesome help with the Vista drag'n'drop stuff.
Christian Lütgens, for his great work as beta-tester and for his help when I needed a 2nd opinion on some decisions.
All donators
For great music: Heaven Shall Burn, Arch Enemy, Machine Head, Trivium, Deadlock, Draconian, Soulfly, Delain, Lacuna Coil, Ensiferum, Epica, Sirenia, Tristania, Nightwish, Battlelore, Amon Amarth, Volbeat, Guns N' Roses

FAQ

1. Why is event xyz not fired?
Firing an event is relative time-consuming, even if the event isn't handled by the application at all. Therefore I implemented a DisabledEvents property which can be used to deactivate certain events.
By default many events are deactivated.

2. Why so many properties don't seem to work?
Microsoft Office uses a text processor that has been heavily extended compared to the Windows Rich Text control. Both implementations share the same API, but great parts of this API are not implemented in the Windows Rich Text control. Even the Rich Text component of Microsoft Office supports only a few more parts of the API, because the Office text processor depends on more components than just this one.
However, in the past Microsoft did port some features of Microsoft Office to the Windows Rich Text control. Also it is nearly impossible to test which feature is available under which conditions. So I decided for the simple way and just implemented all features of the Rich Text API, knowing that some of them won't work with current systems, some will work with future systems only, and some of them will never work.
Some features that are known to NOT work on Windows 10:

IRichTextFont::Animation
IRichTextFont::Emboss
IRichTextFont::Engrave
IRichTextFont::Outline