Well, the simple answer is none. I don't need TRichEdit for anything, but it seemed like the best thing available at the time on Windows with Delphi. And I invested a lot of time and effort getting it working using the last free version of TNTware, before it went commercial.
My program is a language translator, so it needs a way for the user to load in text, or type it in manually, or cut/paste it into the window. It has to be able to load Ansi, UTF-8, Unicode, or other file formats. It needs to be able to cut/paste UTF-8.
I actually need more of a word processor window, instead of an editor window, the main difference being word wrap and proportional spacing (for readability).
SynEdit is working fine, except for the character spacing makes the output difficult to read.
I need to be able to display the output of the translator in a separate window, and highlight any words which were not in the dictionary or were unrecognized for some reason, usually delimited by < > (angle brackets) and highlighted in a different color (usually red).
That's one of the main features.
I also need proportional spacing, because it's difficult to read natural language in a fixed-pitch font.
TRichMemo will probably do all that I need, just haven't tried it yet. I had to install the latest snapshot of Lazarus 0.9.27 Beta, so I'm on the bleeding edge of technology now. I try not to complain, but it took me quite some effort to figure out how to install the snapshot. It would seem that all of the necessary paths are not in place for a full recompile. But I made it through that!
I'm running again and I plan to try the TRichMemo.
I hate the way TRichEdit works, and it has so many problems, I would prefer NOT to ever have to deal with it again. I might even try to use TRichMemo in my Delphi version of my program.
My main goal is to get my program to run on Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX, without too many source code changes. I'm least familiar with OSX, so that's still off in my future. If I had a time machine, I'd visit the future and see how it all turned out.
My program has been mostly a hobby for many years, but it might be time to make it available to others. I've often thought about running it on some kind of handheld computer. I am not sure if they are fast enough.
My program is very similar in to the Google translator at:
translate.google.com
I'd like to make my program available on a website, with remote access to a server, very similar to the Google translator or the Babel Fish translator.
I first started working on the idea of building a translator in about 1980, when I was living in Germany. My first implementation was in Fortran on a VAX 11/780, if that gives you some idea of its lineage.
I called the program iTrans then and it's always been called that, since 1980.
www.itrans.com is not my site. That program was a transliterator program for Indian languages like Hindi.
I never trademarked the name, so I'm afraid I'll have to rename the program. Any ideas for a name would be appreciated.