A Technical Look At What Is New In TX Text Control v8

Last week we announced that TX Text Control will be shipping in version 8 on November 1, 2000. If you missed this newsletter, take a look at the archive.

This week, we are going to take a much closer look - from a technical point of view - at what is actually new in version 8.

Bulleted and Numbered Lists

Several properties and methods have been added for this new and much requested feature. The ListType property can be used to set the type of list, bulleted or numbered. The ListAttrDialog method provides a built-in dialog box that can be used to alter the attributes of bulleted and numbered lists. The BulletAttribute and NumberingAttribute properties are implemented to enable the attributes of bulleted and numbered lists to be changed from programming code.

Use TX in MS Internet Explorer

TX Text Control is now shipped with a cabinet file that is needed when TX Text Control is used with Internet Explorer. Version 8 is shipped with a tutorial, which contains detailed information on how to integrate TX Text Control in Internet Explorer either as ActiveX Document created with Visual Basic or directly with HTML code. The setup program installs several examples that demonstrate these new features.

Apartment Threading Model

TX Text Control now supports the Apartment Threading Model and for downloading purposes it is marked as save for scripting and save for initialization.

New Print Method

Because some development environments do not support a printer object, the PrintDoc method has been implemented to enable printing of a complete TX Text Control document.

Better Table Support

Several properties and methods have been added to extend the support of tables. The TableInsertLines method expands a table with additional table lines. The TableInsertColumn and TableDeleteColumn methods enable inserting and deleting table columns. The properties TableCanInsertLines, TableCanInsertColumn and TableCanDeleteColumn informs whether these operation can be performed at a certain input position.

Updated Save and Load Methods

The new method SaveToMemoryBuffer has been implemented as a more flexible extension of the SaveToMemory method. While SaveToMemory only works with a one-dimensional byte-array, the new method can be used with strings as well as with all kinds of one-dimensional arrays. The LoadFromMemory method has also been extended to load data from all of these kinds of buffers.

Generate less Screen Flicker

The new LockWindowUpdate property has been implemented to disable or reenable redrawing. This is useful if a programmer wants to avoid screen flickering when using more than one property one after the other.