About VSVIEW Classic Edition

Automatically format text for display and/or exporting.

VSVIEW allows you to format text into multiple columns for table creation, including adding header, footers, text boxes, borders, and word wrapping. You can render pictures, embed RTF strings, and export to RTF or HTML. There is even a WYSIWYG preview that you can add to your applications, offering unlimited zoom, thumbnails, and side-by-side page previews. Users have full control over zooming and page orientation.

VSVIEW Classic Edition is sold as part of ComponentOne Studio Enterprise and the ComponentOne Studio for ActiveX

New Packaging

VSView 6 included a single OCX file that contained all three controls in the product. In response to user requests, the controls have been split into separate files, VSPrint7.ocx, VSDraw7.ocx, and VSVPort7.ocx. This allows applications that use only one of the controls to become smaller, saving disk space and download time. We have also worked hard to improve our documentation so that new users can get started quickly and experienced programmers can find the information they need more easily.

Document Navigation

The VSPrinter control now has a built-in navigation bar that allows end users to browse through the preview document, zoom in and out, and print. For details, see the NavBar, NavBarColor, and NavBarText properties. VSPrinter 7 also supports navigation with the mouse wheel and keyboard. For details, see the Navigation property.

RTF/HTML Export

This was the most requested feature for this new version. VSPrinter 7 can export documents to RTF and HTML formats, including all font and paragraph formatting, as well as tables. The HTML export filter also allows for paged HTML output, which generates a series of hyperlinked HTML pages. For details, see the ExportFile, ExportFormat, and ExportNavBar properties.

Internet Awareness

VSPrinter 7 has a new URL property that allows you to load documents located on your Web site directly into a control hosted by a browser on the client's machine. For details, VSPrinter 7 also introduces a new ReadyState property and ReadyStateChange event that allow you to monitor the document downloading process and the control state in general.

Tables

Tables have always been one of VSPrinter's most popular features. VSPrinter 7 allows you to create tables with rows that span page breaks, row and column spanning (cell merging), vertical text in table cells, and custom borders on a per-row/per-column basis. The event model for tables has also been improved, so you can add custom contents to individual table cells, suppress repeated values, add spacing before and after each row, and more. For details, see the TableCell property and the BeforeTableCell and AfterTableCell events.

Pictures

VSPrinter 7 has new options for scaling, cropping and aligning pictures. You can now clip, tile, and zoom pictures (scale them while preserving aspect ratio). This is especially useful for handling pictures that come from databases and may have varying dimensions. The new settings can be used in the DrawPicture method and assigned to the TableCell(tcPictureAlignment) property.

Styles

The new Styles property allows you to define, apply, save, and load styles that define the properties for pages, paragraphs, characters, and graphical objects. This makes it easy to create documents with consistent formatting, favors separating formatting from content generation, and eliminates the need to save several controls properties in order to restore them after rendering parts of the document that have special formatting.

Page Ranges

The PrintDialog method has a new setting (pdPrint) that allows users to specify a range of pages and number of copies to print. Also, the PrintDoc method can now handle strings that define complex page ranges (e.g. 1-5, 7, 9, 23-45 ) rather than simply a starting and an ending page.

Active Documents

VSPrinter 7 has new methods that allow you to retrieve text from a document. You can search for a string within a document using the FindText property, or retrieve the contents of an area on a page using the RetrieveText property.

You can also include invisible tags in documents and retrieve them using the FindTag and RetrieveTag properties. You can use tags to implement pop-up help, hyperlinks, and many other interesting and useful elements.

Also, the new ScrollIntoView method allows you to scroll the control so that a specific part of a page is visible to the user.

And Much More...

VSPrinter 7 has numerous other improvements, including much faster display, persisted paper sizes with save documents, the ability to move pages within a document (MovePages method), reset the current document (Clear method), and descriptive error strings (ErrorDescription property).

VSDraw Improvements

VSDraw 7 supports the mouse wheel for scrolling and allows better measurement of strings with the TextWidth and TextHeight properties. VSDraw 7 also has a new property, KeepTextAspect, that allows you to create strings the preserve their aspect ratio when the control is resized or that stretch both horizontally and vertically when the control is resized.

VSViewPort Improvements

VSViewPort 7 supports the mouse wheel for scrolling and has a new FocusTrack property that causes it to scroll automatically so that the control that has the keyboard focus remains visible.

You also get faster display, the ability to move pages within a document, an optional built in navigation bar, and the ability to define and print complex ranges of document pages. With VSVIEW 7.0s documentation, youll have access to more sample code and details about each property, event, and method. And sample projects created in Visual Basic and Visual C++ will help you put the control to use immediately