#258 – RichTextBox Allows Richer Formatting than TextBox

The TextBox control allows you to set various properties to change the font used to display its text.  If you want to format only a subset of the text, or format text items separately, you need to use the RichTextBox control.

The RichTextBox control can only have one child element, which must be a FlowDocument.  The contained document is referenced by the Document property, which is the RichTextBox’s content property.

Here’s a simple example that compares a TextBox to a RichTextBox.

		<TextBox Text="This is a text box.." FontStyle="Italic" FontFamily="Cambria" FontSize="16"
			     Width="150" Height="50" Margin="10"/>

		<RichTextBox  Width="150" Height="75" Margin="10">
			<FlowDocument>
				<Paragraph>
					This is a <Bold>RichTextBox</Bold>, which allows formatting
					individual bits of text <Italic>separately</Italic>.
				</Paragraph>
			</FlowDocument>
		</RichTextBox>