I'm trying to create a rich-text editor with a layout similar to Microsoft Word's 'Page View' or 'Print Layout.' I'd like to have a QTextEdit horizontally centered in the main window, with the scroll-bar aligned against the far right edge of the main window.
I couldn't find a way to move a QTextEdit's default scroll-bar independent of the QTextEdit itself. Instead, I tried creating a separate scroll-bar, and making the QTextEdit grow vertically using the solution found here: A QWidget like QTextEdit that wraps its height automatically to its contents?
Here is my attempt:
import sys
from PySide import QtGui, QtCore
class MainWindow(QtGui.QMainWindow):
def __init__(self):
super(MainWindow, self).__init__()
self.initUI()
def initUI(self):
cw = CentralWidget()
self.setCentralWidget(cw)
self.setGeometry(200, 200, 1000, 600)
self.show()
def resizeEvent(self, event):
self.centralWidget().setFixedHeight(event.size().height())
class CentralWidget(QtGui.QWidget):
def __init__(self):
super(CentralWidget, self).__init__()
self.initUI()
def initUI(self):
text = MainTextEdit()
text.setMinimumWidth(850)
text.setStyleSheet('border: 0;')
pageWidget = QtGui.QWidget()
scroll = QtGui.QScrollArea()
scroll.setVerticalScrollBarPolicy(QtCore.Qt.ScrollBarAlwaysOn)
scroll.setHorizontalScrollBarPolicy(QtCore.Qt.ScrollBarAlwaysOff)
scroll.setMaximumWidth(18)
# If you change setWidgetResizeable to False,
# the textedit will center, but scrolling will not work.
scroll.setWidgetResizable(True)
scroll.setWidget(pageWidget)
hbox = QtGui.QHBoxLayout()
hbox.setContentsMargins(0,0,0,0)
hbox.addStretch(0.5)
hbox.addWidget(text)
hbox.addStretch(0.5)
pageWidget.setLayout(hbox)
hbox2 = QtGui.QHBoxLayout()
hbox2.setContentsMargins(0,0,0,0)
hbox2.addWidget(pageWidget)
hbox2.addWidget(scroll)
self.setLayout(hbox2)
class MainTextEdit(QtGui.QTextEdit):
def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
super(MainTextEdit, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
self.document().contentsChanged.connect(self.sizeChange)
self.setFontPointSize(80)
self.setVerticalScrollBarPolicy(QtCore.Qt.ScrollBarAlwaysOff)
def sizeChange(self):
docHeight = self.document().size().height()
self.setMinimumHeight(docHeight)
def main():
app = QtGui.QApplication(sys.argv)
mw = MainWindow()
sys.exit(app.exec_())
if __name__ == '__main__':
main()
There are at least two problems with this:
Problem #1
As is, the code above does not horizontally center the QTextEdit in the main window, but the scroll bar at the far-right does work. If you change scroll.setWidgetResizable(True) to scroll.setWidgetResizable(False) on line 41, the QTextEdit will center horizontally, but the scroll-bar does not work. It seems you can get one feature or the other, but not both.
Problem #2
In order to keep the MainWindow from auto-expanding when the QTextEdit grows, the MainWindow assigns a fixed height to the CentralWidget whenever the MainWindow is resized (see line 19 of the code above). This works well until the user tries to vertically shrink the main window. The window can be vertically expanded by clicking and dragging the bottom border, but it can't be vertically shrunk.
Conclusion
Maybe this is the wrong approach all-together. Any suggestions?
