more problems with the RichText components

rbuser

1. The RichText components seems to have some problems with the Transparent
property.
With Transparent = True the fonts appear different on the screen preview. In
this case the fonts appear somewhat unsharp. The output on the printer is
ok.

2. The richtext controls are printed with a 1/32 inch left margin. So it is
very difficult to align richtext fields with other fields. Please introduce
a LeftMargin property for the richtext controls.

(I have already posted this problem in an earlier message.)

Jo Reiter
Reiter Software

digitalmetaphors

The transparency doesn't work on all printers for richtext or images. Our
screen preview uses the riched.dll to render on our screen canvas. You may
want to research using Infopower or WPTools rich text components in RB.


The RichText in ReportBuilder is a wrapper around Delphi's TRichEdit which
in turn relies on Windows. There are two versions of Windows richedit -
RichEd32.dll is the older one and RichEd20.dll is a newer one (RichEd32
is being phased out). Delphi by default relies on RichEd32 - the older
version. To use some of the more advanced features of Windows RichEdit, see
the topic on InfoPower RichEdit Support below.

In general Windows RichEdit supports the type of formatting that you can do
using WordPad.



InfoPower RichEdit Support
---------------------------
InfoPower from Woll2Woll Software is a popular database add-on product for
Delphi. InfoPower's TwwRichEdit components support the Windows RichEdit2
format. This format allows the rich text data to contain embedded bitmaps
and OLE objects. For more information please see http:\\www.Woll2Woll.com.

ReportBuilder includes a component that enables the TppRichText and
TppDBRichText controls in ReportBuilder to use the formatting capabilities
of InfoPower's TwwRichEdit when rendering RTF data. The ppWWRichEd.pas unit
located in the ..\RBuilder\InfoPower directory defines a TwwDBRichEdit
descendant and then registers the class with
ReportBuilder. This enables the TppRichText and TppDBRichText controls in
ReportBuilder to use the formatting capabilities of TwwDBRichEidt when
rendering data.


WPTools Support
----------------
WPTools is a collection of components used to edit and print formatted text.
With its own RTF engine, WPTools offers
numerous features not supported by the standard Windows RichEd20.dll. This
control lets you use tables, paragraph
frames, headers and footers etc. Using the optional ReportBuilder support
units for WPTools 2.x, you can print
the enhanced WPTools features (justified text, tables, graphics ...) within
your ReportBuilder reports. For more information please see
http:\\www.wptools.de.


Cheers,

Jim Bennett
Digital Metaphors

digitalmetaphors

2. The left margin is built into the rich text when it is rendered. We'll
need to take this out, and make it a margins property, without breaking all
existing reports. Thanks for the feedback.


Cheers,

Jim Bennett
Digital Metaphors