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DevX Review
Quick integration of word processing capabilities through class libraries or an ActiveX control, including loading and saving compound documents; Word formats, tables and images; and numerous other document editing and formatting capabilities.
Many applications need to provide some document editing and creation capabilities as part of their functionality. This is true whether it's the app's primary focus or just a secondary function (such as the ability to enter and record comments or descriptions of objects in the application). Depending on the application, you might be able to get away with the capabilities of Windows' simple edit or the rich-text edit controls, which are approachable to program from C++ because MFC provides wrapper classes for them. But if you want to provide complex document editing and formatting capabilities, you'll still end up writing and debugging a considerable amount of code.
With TX Text Control Professional 7.0, you can avoid reinventing the wheel when adding document creation and editing capabilities to your applications. This tool provides functionality that includes many common features found in front-line word processors, such as Microsoft Word and WordPerfect. Among its finer qualities: You can create and format documents with a variety of fonts, styles, and colors; you can embed ActiveX objects or images in a document and create tables, format them, and link them to databases; and you can load and save your documents to a variety of formats, including plain text, Word 97 and 2000, RTF, and HTML.
TX Text Control Professional includes Visual C++ MFC class libraries and an ActiveX control library that allow you to choose how to integrate these capabilities into your app; if you purchase the Standard version, you only get the ActiveX controls.
The library contains four main controls: The text editing control itself, a status bar, a button bar (or toolbar), and a ruler bar. These controls are obviously designed to work together to provide the full capabilities of a word processor when they're integrated into an application. You can integrate them individually and hook them together in code, or you can use the MFC/C++ class libraries to make life even easier. Simply derive your view and document classes from CTXView and CTXDoc, respectively, and basically you'll get a fully functional word processor with almost no effort.
The tool has few downsides. One is you're pretty much stuck with the toolbars and ruler controls as designed - you can't customize their look or functionality at all. Of course, you could add your own toolbars or controls and drive the text editor programmatically based on your own control events. Another drawback is you must include many DLLs when using the class libraries, so there's potential for DLL hell while trying to deal with versioning over time.
The product ships with good documentation that includes tutorials and samples for a variety of languages, including C++, Visual Basic, and Delphi. A downloadable trial version is available from the TX Text Control Web site that's fully functional - it just has a nag screen that pops up every now and then - so you can try out its capabilities and decide if TX Text Control provides the functionality you're after.
