Markup in control labels

Posted on February 22, 2011 by Vadim Zeitlin

As I’m hopelessly out of date with my planned updates anyhow, I’ve decided to write a brief post about a nice new feature that was recently to instead.

This feature is the possibility to use Pango-like markup in some wxWidgets controls, notably wxButton and wxStaticText. This means that it is now possible to write:

wxButton *b = new wxButton(parent, wxID_ANY, "");
b->SetLabelMarkup("<span size='x-large' color='blue'>Big</span> <b>bold</b> button");

and it will indeed behave as expected:

Currently this works for wxButton in all major ports and for the wxGTK and the generic versions of wxStaticText (that can be used under all platforms if this feature is important). The plan is to extend this to more controls later, e.g. wxCheckBox, wxRadioButton or wxStaticBox and maybe even allow using markup for the items of controls with multiple items such as wxListBox or wxComboBox. There is however no definite schedule for this so if anybody is interested in using markup with these controls, please consider helping with implementing it, it should be pretty simple to do by simply copying wxButton behaviour.