Text Control 30.0 provides the following new features:
| Feature | Description | |
| Extended Character Attributes | TextControl supports now automatic sub- and superscript settings, text effects with uppercase letters and a user-defined character spacing and scaling. The new properties AutoBaseLine, Capitals, CharacterSpacing and CharacterScaling can be used to define or retrieve these settings. When using automatic sub- and superscript the font is scaled and moved above or below the baseline with values defined through the font itself. When a font does not define these values, TextControl uses a scaling of 50% and moving of 40% above and 15% below the baseline. In addition to standard sub- and superscript TextControl also offers subscripts aligned at the baseline and superscripts that do not extend above the ascender line. These special sub- and superscripts can be used for the numerators and denominators of diagonal fractions such as the Spanish c/u (cada uno) or for ordinal indicators such as the English 1th. All of these automatic sub- and superscript features can be combined with a user-defined baseline position which can furthermore be set with the BaseLine property. Further text effects are capital and small capital letters. In all cases lowercase letters are displayed either with capital letters of the same size or with capital letters which have a smaller size. The smaller size is either the size of the lowercase 'x' (petite caps) or the size of the lowercase 'x' + 10% (small caps). A further new character attribute is a user-defined character spacing where a fixed value is added to each character. When this value is negative, character spacing is reduced, otherwise it is extended. The character widths can also be scaled now specified in percent of the average character width. All of these new character attributes are also implemented and available as attributes of formatting styles, corresponding properties have been added to the Style object. The font and formatting style dialogboxes have been extended to make these attributes available for the end-user. All of the text filters have been extended to exchange these attributes with other applications. | |
| Comments | Parts of a document can be commented now. An end-user can select a piece of text and open a comment input control through the context menu to type the comment's text. When the input control is closed, either through a mouse click or through the Enter key, the comment is added to the document and the commented text is highlighted on the screen with a color depending on the user, the default color for the current user is red. The comment's context menu also offers entries to change, remove and reply to a comment. Programmatically, the comment input control can be opened with the CommentInsert, CommentReply and CommentEdit methods. All comments in a document have an unique identifier and can be enumerated with the CommentNext method. Each comment has a creation time and is related to a user. When a new comment is inserted, the current user is associated with it. The current user is the first in the list of users set with the UserNames property. When the list of users is empty, the CommentUserName is set to an empty string which is interpreted as an unknown user. Comments can have replies which are also contained in the list of comments. Replies are associated with the same piece of text, but can be related to another user and can have another creation time. The relationship is available through the CommentReplies property retrieving an array with the identifiers of all replies of a comment. When the original comment is removed from the document all of its replies are also removed. Events occur, when a comment is created (CommentCreated), deleted (CommentDeleted) or the text of the comment is changed (CommentChanged). Further events occur, when the current input position has been moved to a position that belongs to a commented piece of text (CommentedTextEntered) or when the current input position has left it (CommentedTextLeft). Comments are saved and can be reloaded with the TextControl text format (.tx), the Rich Text Format (.rtf) and the Microsoft Word formats (.doc, .docx). | |
| Formatting Styles | The character input language can now be specified as an attrbute of character- and paragraph-based formatting styles. The formatting style dialog box and all text filters have been extended to support this feature. The Style.Locale property has been added to set a style's language programmatically. |