WPF HTML Editor Control

Use WYSIWYG mode when users want to compose visually. Switch to Source mode when a developer or power user needs to inspect or edit the generated HTML. Use Preview mode when content should be rendered read-only before saving, printing, or sending.

The Source view is formatted and indented in 3.x, not a single unwrapped line of markup. Right-click anywhere in WYSIWYG and select View Source to inspect the markup behind a selection without leaving the document.

In Preview mode, Ctrl-clicking a hyperlink opens it in the user's actual default browser. That keeps preview behavior aligned with the user's desktop environment while the editor remains embedded inside your WPF screen.

Some WPF screens only need an HTML fragment saved into a database column. Other workflows need a complete document for email, export, preview, or integration with another system. The editor exposes both shapes without forcing you to scrape the document yourself.

• BodyHtml, the inner HTML of the document body, useful when you store content inside your own page, template, or database column.
• DocumentHtml, the full HTML document including wrapper, header, and DOCTYPE, useful when you save or send standalone HTML.

HTML5 is the default document type in 3.x, with override controls available for older render targets. That gives your WPF app a predictable output contract for templates, emails, CRM notes, and ERP letters.

End users paste from Word and Outlook every day. If the editor does not handle that well, your database fills with Office clipboard noise and your support team eventually owns the problem.

The editor auto-detects Microsoft Office clipboard content on paste and cleans it to standards-compliant XHTML automatically. There is no separate "Paste from Word" button to teach, and no MsoNormal classes polluting the output. Set Options.AutoDetectWordPaste and it is on.

If you need a stricter cleanup policy, the Pasting event fires before clipboard content reaches the document. Inspect the HTML, modify it, replace it, or cancel the paste outright before the content becomes part of your WPF application's data.

Business users paste screenshots, insert logos, link product images, and expect the content to survive when it is emailed or published. The editor supports images from a local file, an absolute URL, or directly from the clipboard.

Clipboard images can be embedded as Base64 Data URIs so the HTML is self-contained, or saved to a base folder and referenced by relative path using the editor's BaseUrl. Pasted screenshots and photos auto-resize to a sensible maximum width by default, controlled by MaxPastedImageWidth.

When you need to publish, EmbedLocalImagesAsBase64() walks the document and converts every local image to a Base64 Data URI in a single call. YouTube embedding is supported through the toolbar, with the option to add ?rel=0. Hyperlinks support cross-document bookmark targets through the hyperlink dialog.

Spell check should not become another installer project. It works the moment you drop the control in, with no native DLLs to copy and no dictionary files to bundle for the built-in languages. 14 Hunspell dictionaries are embedded directly in the control.

Set SpellCheckOptions.SpellCheckLanguage to English (US), English (GB), German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, Czech, Portuguese (Brazil), or Portuguese (Portugal). Or leave it on Same as Editor Language so it tracks the editor UI language.

The engine is a pure-managed Hunspell implementation. Inline red-squiggle and dialog-based modes are supported, along with a per-user custom dictionary. For another language, drop in any OpenOffice .dic / .aff pair. If you already have your own spell-check engine, plug it in through ISpellCheckerEngine.

European enterprise WPF apps cannot treat localization as a cosmetic afterthought. Set one property and the editor UI reflows:

editor.Language = EditorLanguage.German;

Every toolbar tooltip, dialog caption, dialog button, and context-menu item appears in the chosen language. Fourteen UI languages are bundled: English (US), English (UK), German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Italian, Danish, Polish, Norwegian, Czech, Swedish, Portuguese (Brazil), and Portuguese (Portugal).

UI language and spell-check language are independent. You can run a German UI with an English spell-check dictionary if users edit English content in a German shell. UI language is set with Language, spell-check language is set with SpellCheckOption.SpellCheckLanguage.

A WPF editor should not force your application to accept someone else's toolbar model. Show, hide, replace, or extend any toolbar button. Build a custom button entirely from XAML or code.

Override the click handler of any built-in button through ToolbarItemOverrider. That is useful when the editor's Save button should call into your application's save pipeline instead of opening a file dialog.

State-aware behavior comes for free: the SelectionChanged event and the StateQuery service report which formatting is active at the caret, so custom buttons can highlight or disable themselves correctly. To skip the built-in toolbar entirely, build your own around Editor, Formatting, Selection, and StateQuery.

An embedded editor should not fight the host application for keyboard shortcuts. In a mature WPF app, the keyboard already belongs to menus, ribbons, commands, and user muscle memory.

The KeyBindings manager exposes binding, unbinding, overriding, disabling, enabling, and querying for editor actions represented by EditorActionId. Thirty-five actions are covered: bold, italic, underline, cut, copy, paste, undo, redo, search, spell check, ordered and unordered list commands, alignment commands, insert commands for table, image, hyperlink, symbol, and YouTube video, font color, highlight color, indent, outdent, and more.

Use it to keep familiar shortcuts where users expect them, or to let your host application's global commands win when the editor has focus.

WPF buyers often need more than a color change. They need dialogs that match a corporate design system, collect extra metadata, enforce business rules, or use the application's own picker screens.

The source code for every dialog ships in the trial and product package: Image Insert, Hyperlink, Search, Style Builder, Symbol Picker, Table, Table Cell, YouTube Embed, and the Spell Checker. Even without a Source Code License, you receive every dialog's source. Restyle them, change the layout, add fields, remove fields, then ship.

If you would rather replace a dialog entirely, every dialog is fronted by an interface: IImageDialog, IHyperlinkDialog, ISearchDialog, IStyleBuilderDialog, ISymbolDialog, ITableDialog, ITableCellDialog, IYouTubeVideoInsertDialog, and ISpellCheckerDialog. Assign your own ContextMenu through EditorContextMenuStrip.

The editor uses standard WPF theming. Swap a single ResourceDictionary to retheme it for light mode, dark mode, or your own design system colors and typography. The XAML vector toolbar adapts to brushes you supply.

There is no proprietary skin engine to learn and no separate theme format to bolt on. It follows standard WPF resource resolution, the way you already style the rest of your application.

For teams that need to retemplate dialogs end to end or align deeply with a corporate WPF design system, the Source Code License includes the full source code of the control. That is why the WPF product speaks directly to buyers who expect customization, not just configuration.

Tables are where many simple HTML editors fall apart. Users insert a table, edit a few cells, then the next time they open the dialog it no longer understands what is already there.

The two-way table dialog in 3.x reads the existing table's structure and styling back from the document: row count, column count, border style, cell padding, cell background color, and cell-level styling. Users continue editing without starting over.

For code-driven workflows, Content.TableAuthoringService exposes operations such as InsertRow, InsertColumn, MergeSelectedCells, and more. Cell merging can be toggled globally through the EnableTableCellMerge option.

Not every user who formats an email letter, support reply, or ERP document template should be asked to write CSS. The visual CSS style builder is available at design time through the WPF property surface and at runtime from the editor toolbar.

End users pick font, size, color, background, border, margin, and padding from familiar controls. The editor writes the equivalent inline or class-scoped CSS into the document.

To add your own pages to the style builder, for example a Corporate Branding tab with your standard color palette, implement IEditorStylePage and decorate the form with FormSelectorPageAttribute. That gives your application a supported extension point instead of a separate styling workaround.

Many business editors are not free-form text boxes. They are template builders. Users need to insert fields like customer name, invoice number, due date, ticket ID, assigned agent, or company name without hand-typing fragile tokens.

The editor exposes mail-merge placeholders through Content.MailMerge. Define the available fields, expose an opt-in placeholder toolbar through ShowPlaceholderToolbar, insert placeholders at the caret programmatically through InsertPlaceholder, and handle the PlaceholderInserted event when users insert one.

Your back-end merge code replaces the placeholders at send time. This is the workflow behind email templates, CRM messages, support replies, invoice notes, notification bodies, ERP letter composition, Dynamics NAV style email letters, and other document templates your WPF application needs to author.

Senior WPF developers need more than a toolbar. They need an API surface that can be driven from their own commands, bindings, save pipeline, and template workflow.

• Content service. Read, set, insert, transform, and export HTML through the Content service. Sub-services for MailMerge and TableAuthoringService.
• Caret service. Get and set caret position by point or by index through the Caret service.
• Editor commands. Cut, copy, paste, undo, redo, search, replace, print, and command execution through the Editor service.
• Formatting service. Apply bold, italic, underline, font, colors, alignment, lists, headings, and format removal through Formatting.
• Selection service. Read selected HTML, select text, select all, and trim selections through Selection.
• State query service. Ask whether the current selection is bold, italic, inside a table, undoable, or redoable, with 37 query methods through StateQuery.
• HTML-Changed event. HtmlChanged fires immediately when the document changes.
• Email-ready output. Content.GetEmailMessageWithLocalImagesEmbedded() returns a populated MailMessage with images embedded.
• Enter-key behavior. Choose paragraph (<p>) or line-break (<br>) behavior through EnterKeyResponse.

Building a Windows Forms application instead of WPF? SpiceLogic offers a separate WinForms HTML Editor Control with its own landing page, documentation, and licensing.

The two products share design philosophy and API patterns but ship as separate controls optimized for each desktop UI stack.

Use this page for WPF applications. Use the WinForms page when your application is built on Windows Forms. That separation matters because a WPF team should evaluate WPF theming, XAML integration, and binding behavior, while a WinForms team should evaluate a control built for its own stack.