Advise regarding rich text or xml/xslt editing
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Using C# 3.5 I develop a WinForm application that should mimic a word processor, e.g. allow users to type text, insert images and tables and apply certain formatting styles to them. Then I need to parse the text, replace certain variables with data from a database. merge multiple 'documents' and create output in at least PDF and possibly either DOC, RTF or HTML. At first I thought this shouldn't be hard: there are so many commercial and open source components available. At least one of them should fit my needs. But I seemed wrong about that: I cannot find any suitable technique that allows me to do all this without bugs or too much complexity. For instance: I've tried RTF: .net RichTextBox control cannot adjust the table's width, nor would I like to search/replace rtf-fieldcodes to add data driven content. TX TextControl seemed like a good choice, but it is a wrapper around some native win32 dll that has it's limitations as well (conversion / resizing / drawing issues). TE Edit has buggy table-support PinEdit uses Internet Explorer (I don't like dependencies to Internet Explorer) DevExpress has no table support in their RichEdit component That's when I thought I would like to separate content and layout and use an officially accepted standard for that. So I looked at XML-authoring components such as XMetal and Syntext Serna, but they seem offer much more than I need (such as workflow), complex to configure and embed and don't fit the skin in my application. After all this I've seem to have hit a brick wall. Can anyone give some advise, leads, directions or best practices?