What's New in TX Text Control 18.0

Charts entered TX Text Control documents in version 18.0. Together with a z-order for all objects and transparent text frames, the version let images, text frames and charts lie above or below the text and each other.

Version 18.0 was released in August 2012 as TX Text Control X8, as the press release Press Release: TX Text Control X8 (18.0) Released announced. Features of the Windows Forms and WPF controls, such as the chart layout dialog box, the spell checking context menu of the WPF control and the new status bar design, aren't listed here.

Version 18.0 at a Glance

Charts

A document can contain chart controls of the type System.Windows.Forms.DataVisualization.Charting.Chart, which is part of the .NET Framework from version 4 on.

• Position. A DataVisualization.ChartFrame places the chart like an image or a text frame: as a character in the text, anchored to a paragraph or relative to the document. The frame is connected to a chart control through Chart, which holds the appearance and the data.
• Collection. ServerTextControl.Charts returns a DataVisualization.ChartCollection, which adds and removes charts. The events ChartCreated and ChartDeleted report changes.
• Formats. The TX Text Control format and RTF save a chart as a chart, which is rebuilt when the document is loaded. Other formats save its image. On a system without the chart controls, the image is inserted instead.

Charts and Barcodes shows how charts are used in the current version.

Z-Order and Frames

• Above and below the text. The new insertion modes AboveTheText and BelowTheText put an object in front of the text or behind it. ImageCollection.Add, TextFrameCollection.Add and ChartCollection.Add accept them, as do the InsertionMode properties of images, text frames and frames.
• Change the order. ChangeZOrder moves an image, text frame or chart one plane up or down, or to the top or the bottom. Objects inserted as characters always have the z-order 0.
• Transparent text frames. TextFrame.Transparency takes a value from 0, opaque, to 255, completely transparent, so that objects behind the frame show through.
• All frames. ServerTextControl.Frames returns a FrameCollection with all images, text frames and charts, which changes their common attributes.

More Changes

• Text parts. Two new overloads of TextPartCollection.GetItem return the offset of a text part from the top left corner of the control and the text part at a given location.
• Spell checking. MisspelledWord.IsIgnored marks a misspelled word as ignored: it stays in the collection but isn't underlined. MisspelledWord.IsDuplicate tells whether the word repeats the word in front of it. MisspelledWordCollection.Ignore ignores a word, and GetCount counts the words of one kind.
• EMF images. TX Text Control supports the Windows Enhanced Metafile format (EMF). EMF and WMF images are handled internally, so the WMF image filter is no longer needed.
• Initialization. ServerTextControl.IsCreated tells whether the control has been created completely.

Upgrade to Version 18.0

• MisspelledWordCollection.GetItem. The location parameter of MisspelledWordCollection.GetItem is given in pixels instead of twips.
• Insertion modes. The enumerations ImageInsertionMode and TextFrameInsertionMode have the new values AboveTheText and BelowTheText.

New Classes, Properties, Methods and Events

The classes and members below are the ones that the What's New documentation of version 18.0 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.

New Classes

• DataVisualization.ChartCollection
• DataVisualization.ChartEventArgs
• DataVisualization.ChartFrame
• FrameCollection

Members by Class

Next Steps

• Version 19.0: the features of the next version.
• Version 17.0: merged table cells, page borders and digital signatures.
• Text Frames and Shapes: work with text frames today.