What's New in TX Text Control ActiveX 15.1
The following features are new or have been improved in TX Text Control ActiveX 15.1:
New and Updated Features
- Saving Images
Image formats are automatically maintained or can be adjusted programmatically using the SaveSettings class.
- Unlimited Zoom Factor
The ZoomFactor of a TextControl is no longer limited to 400 percent, when the ViewMode property has been set to PageView or Normal. For the other modes the zoom factor is limited to 400 percent.
- Mouse Wheel
The functionality of the mouse wheel has been extended. Pressing the SHIFT key scrolls the visual part of the document horizontally and pressing the CONTROL key zooms the document.
- Supported Fonts
The new GetSupportedFonts method returns an array of strings specifying the names of all currently supported fonts.
Display Colors - Skinnable Controls
Using the new ColorScheme, the color of the tool bar and text control can now be set. By default the controls have a fixed color table for the standard Windows themes. Supported standard themes are the following Windows XP standard themes:
- luna.msstyles (colors: Blue (NormalColor)
- Olive Green (Homestead)
- Silver (Metallic)
Windows XP Media Center Edition standard theme:
- royale.msstyles (colors: NormalColor and Royale)
Windows Vista and Windows 7 standard theme:
- aero.msstyles (colors: NormalColor)
For all other themes, the default colors depend upon theme colors. If no theme is selected, the default colors depend upon system colors.
The following screenshots illustrate some possible color combinations:
Additionally, the ruler bars, the status bar and the text control itself can be fully colored:
The following screenshot shows all controls together in a gray skin:
Fully featured built-in drag and drop support
TX Text Control ActiveX now has built in drag and drop functionality. Drag and drop is a very fast and easy technique for end-users to move selected text from one document to another or to copy text from one application (such as Microsoft Internet Explorer) to another (such as a TX Text Control ActiveX document).
Internal text drag and drop
In TX Text Control ActiveX, you can select text and press and hold down the left mouse button in order to grab the current selection. TX Text Control ActiveX shows the new input position with the special mouse cursor. By default text is moved via drag and drop. By pressing the CTRL key you can copy it instead. The ESC key cancels an operation.
External drag and drop
You can drag and drop formatted text from other applications to TX Text Control ActiveX as well.
The property TextControl.AllowDrop installs the control as a target for data the user drags onto it. The property TextControl.AllowDrag enables the control as a source of a drop and drop operation.
TX Text Control ActiveX accepts text formatted as:
- Rich Text Format
- HTML
- Plain text
Images may be formatted as:
- Device dependent bitmaps
- Device independent bitmaps
- TIFF
- Windows metafiles
Image and TextFrame Positioning
In previous versions of TX Text Control ActiveX, the insertion mode for images or text frames could be only changed in the constructor of the Images.Add method or the dialog box.
The insertion mode determines whether an image or text frame is treated as a single character, or whether text flows around the image or text frame. If text flows around the image, this property also determines whether the image is moved with the text or fixed positioned on a page.
- AsCharacter
The image is inserted in the text as a single character.
- DisplaceCompleteLines
The image is inserted at a certain geometrical location. The text stops at the top and continues at the bottom of the image.
- DisplaceText
The image is inserted at a certain geometrical location. The text flows around the image and empty areas at the left and right side are filled.
- MoveWithText
The image is connected with a paragraph and moved with the text.
- FixedOnPage
The image is fixed positioned on a page.
In TX Text Control ActiveX ActiveX 15.1, the ObjectInsertionMode property has been added to adjust the insertion mode of images and text frames.
Inserting Images from Memory
The new Image constructor accepts a System.Drawing.Image object, which is used to initialize the TXTextcontrol.Image object.
This new feature allows you to insert images from memory. The following code snippet inserts a scaled thumbnail image of the current page at the current input position.
Image img = textControl1.GetPages()[1].GetImage(20,
TXTextControl.Page.PageContent.All);
TXTextControl.Image myImage = new TXTextControl.Image(img);
textControl1.Images.Add(myImage, -1);
This new feature allows you to interact much better with third-party components (charting, barcode etc.) Such components are able to export a high quality image or metafile. Using the new Image constructor, you can now directly insert such image data into TX Text Control ActiveX, without having to save it to the local hard disk first.
Image Rendering
The image rendering quality and display performance has been increased significantly. Version 15.1 comes with smoothing filters for rendering images that are scaled. This results in much better and professional looking images, when for example, you insert high resolution company logos, which have been down-scaled.
The following screenshot shows an image down-scaled to 20 percent in version 15.0:
The following screenshot shows the new rendering in version 15.1:
Additionally, the memory consumption has been improved drastically. Images are only unpacked to memory when they are displayed on the screen. This improves the memory usage and the performance of loading or converting documents for example.
