What's New in TX Text Control 12.0
ServerTextControl was born in TX Text Control 12.0: the programming interface of the Windows Forms TextControl without a user interface, for server applications. The same version introduced text frames and images anchored to a paragraph, and gave table rows control over page breaks.
Version 12.0 was released in August 2005 as TX Text Control .NET for Windows Forms 12.0, as the blog article TX Text Control 12.0 Released announced. The server product, TX Text Control Server for ASP.NET (incl. Windows Forms) 12.0, followed in November 2005, as the press release Press Release: TX Text Control Server for ASP.NET (incl. Windows Forms) 12.0 is Released announced. It ran on Internet Information Server and sent its output to an HTTP stream or a file without showing anything on the server. Features of the Windows Forms control, such as the attribute dialog boxes for images and text frames and the mouse interface for moving and sizing them, aren't listed here.
Version 12.0 at a Glance
| Area | What is new |
|---|---|
| Server programming | The ServerTextControl class |
| Text frames | Rectangles of editable text, positioned like images |
| Images | Anchored to a paragraph |
| Tables | Rows that aren't broken across pages, a minimum row height |
ServerTextControl
ServerTextControl has the programming interface of the TextControl class without its visual interface, for use in ASP.NET server applications. It loads, changes and saves documents with members such as Create, which has to be called before any other member, Load, Save, Selection, Tables, Images and HeadersAndFooters. The version's ASP.NET User's Guide came with many samples. ServerTextControl describes the class as it is today.
Text Frames and Anchored Images
- Anchored images. Besides inserting an image as a character or positioning it on a page, an image can be anchored to a paragraph. The text flows around it, its position is relative to the paragraph, and it moves with the text. New overloads of ImageCollection.Add insert such images, and all properties of Image support them.
- Text frames. A TextFrame is a rectangle of text that can be edited like the main text and positioned like an image: as a character, anchored to a paragraph or relative to a page. ServerTextControl.TextFrames returns a TextFrameCollection, which works like the collection of images.
- The text of a frame. A text frame has its own Selection, Lines, TextChars, Tables, TextFields and Images, so that its text is programmed like the main text. BorderWidth, InternalMargins and BackColor set its border, its margins and its background.
- Events. TextFrameCreated and TextFrameDeleted pass a TextFrameEventArgs object.
Text Frames and Shapes and Images show how to work with them today.
Tables
A forced page break can be placed anywhere in a table, which moves the whole table row to the next page. TableRow.AllowPageBreak set to false keeps a row from being broken across pages, and TableRow.MinimumHeight sets the height a row has at least; it grows when its text needs more room. See Tables.
Upgrade to Version 12.0
Version 12.0 has no update notes.
New Classes, Properties, Methods and Events
The classes and members below are the ones that the What's New documentation of version 12.0 lists for TX Text Control .NET Server. Names are relative to the TXTextControl namespace, each name links to its current reference page, and "(obsolete)" marks a member that is obsolete today. The version's own list also names TableRow as a new class, but TableRow.Select dates from version 10.1, so it isn't listed under New Classes. It further lists TextFrames properties of MainText, FootnoteSection and FootnoteText, classes that the reference dates to versions 16.0 and 32.0; they are left out here.
New Classes
Members by Class
Next Steps
- Version 13.0: the features of the next version.
- Version 11.0: nested tables, table splitting and PDF security.
- ServerTextControl: the class as it is today.