New Features and Update Notes

TX Text Control 14.0 provides several new features described in the following table.

64 Bit Edition

TX Text Control is available as a 64 bit edition. All kernel and filter DLL files have been extended to support 64 bit memory addresses. The names of the DLL files are the same for 32 bit and 64 bit. The TX Text Control class library is platform independent.

Section Formatting

A document can be split into several sections to enable different page sizes and margins and different headers and footers in the same document. An end-user can use the new Page Setup dialog box available through the TextControl.SectionFormatDialog method. All section attributes and headers and footers can be set either for a single section or for the complete document. A SectionCollection available through the TextControl.Sections property enables a programmer to alter the formatting attributes of a section from programming code. The sections of a document are numbered beginning with 1. The StatusBar has been extended to show the section number at the text input position. Additionally, it shows the number of pages and the number of sections contained in the document.

Headers and Footers

The contents and the alignment of headers and footers can be different for each section. Also each section can have a special header and a special footer for the section's first page. If a section does not need its own header or footer, its header or footer can be connected with the header or footer of the previous section. The HeaderFooter.ConnectedToPrevious property implements this feature. A HeaderFooterCollection is available for the complete document and for a single section.

WordprocessingML Format

TX Text Control supports the WordprocessingML part of the Microsoft Office Open XML format. This format is a ZIP compressed XML format for word processing and is used as standard format of Microsoft Word. A TextControl can load and save files (.docx extension) and blocks of memory containing documents formatted with this format. The StreamType and BinaryStreamType enumerations have been extended with the WordprocessingML member thus this format can be loaded and saved with the TextControl.Load and TextControl.Save methods.

Import and Export of Microsoft Word Fields

TX Text Control now supports importing and exporting Microsoft Word fields contained in Microsoft Word and RTF documents. The arguments and switches of these fields are available through the ApplicationField class using the ApplicationFieldFormat.MSWord format. This class only provides an interface to retrieve and change the data and parameters of such fields. The field logic itself is not implemented. The TextControl.ApplicationFields collection lists all fields in the document. Before loading a document the LoadSettings.ApplicationFieldFormat property must be set to ApplicationFieldFormat.MSWord. The LoadSettings.ApplicationFieldTypeNames property can be used to select particular types of fields. For more information, see the technical article Text Fields and Hypertext Links - Importing Fields from Microsoft Word.

Mail Merge

A MailMerge component has been added that can be used to effortlessly merge template documents with database content in .NET projects, such as ASP.NET web applications, web services or Windows services. The MailMerge component uses a ServerTextControl and fields of the type ApplicationField to merge the database content and a document template. The set of merged documents can be saved in each format available through the StreamType enumeration, either as single documents or as one document.

Import and Export of Heiler HighEdit Fields

TX Text Control also supports the import and export of Heiler HighEdit fields contained in RTF documents. The names of these fields are available through the ApplicationField class using the ApplicationFieldFormat.HighEdit format.

Page Coordinates

Because a document can have pages with different sizes a PageCollection informs about the alignment of the page and the page's text contents. Furthermore, a Page object has properties to inform about its character index, number of characters, section number and the number of the page in the section. The PageCollection is available through the TextControl.GetPages method.

Merging Documents

For better support when merging documents, the TextControl.Append and ServerTextControl.Append methods have been added. These sets of methods load text in a certain format from a file, a byte array or a string and append it to the existing document. It can be specified that the document is appended at the end of the existing document or if a new paragraph or section is created for the appended document.

Formatting Printer

A printer for which the document is formatted can be specified with the TextControl.FormattingPrinter property. If the document is printed with this printer the displayed and the printed document have the same dimensions. The formatting device can also be the display device.

Background Printing

Additional contents such as images or watermarks can be printed on a page of a document. An application can add its own PrintPageEventHandler to a PrintDocument. If this handler performs some output the contents of a TextControl or ServerTextControl are printed transparently on top of this output.

HeaderFooterCollection.Style Property

This property has been replaced with the TextControl.HeaderFooterActivationStyle and TextControl.HeaderFooterFrameStyle properties.