New Features

TX Text Control 25.0 provides the following new features:

Objects in Headers and Footers

Images, text frames and other objects such as barcodes and drawings can be inserted everywhere on a page, when a header or a footer is activated. The object is displayed then in the background on every page on which the header or footer appears. This feature can be used to realize watermarks or other page background images. Such an object must be inserted at a fixed position on the page, the InsertionMode property must be set to FrameInsertionMode.FixedOnPage. The height of the header or footer does not depend on the position of these objects.

Documents with Restricted Access

TextControl can edit now documents with restrictions such as forbid editing, printing, formatting or copying contents to the clipboard. These restrictions can be specified with the DocumentPermissions property of a TextControl or WPF.TextControl and they are activated, if the EditMode property is changed from Edit to ReadAndSelect. If UsePassword is specified with the EditMode property, a dialog box is opened where the user can enter a password which protects the restrictions. To unprotect the document the same password must be entered when the edit mode is reset to Edit. The set of permissions and the password are saved in the document in an encrypted form. When a password protected document is loaded it is opened read only. Supported text formats are RTF, Microsoft Word (DOC and DOCX), Adobe PDF and the TX TextControl text format (TX).

Editable Regions

Editable regions are pieces of text that remain editable when the EditMode property has been set to ReadAndSelect. An editable region can be defined through a start position and a length or through a selection and they can overlap. All editable regions are contained in a EditableRegionCollection which can be obtained with the TextControl.EditableRegions, TextFrame.EditableRegions or HeaderFooter.EditableRegions property. These collections can be used to add or to remove an editable region. Each editable region is related to a user through the UserName property. Only this user can edit the region, when the document has been set to read only. To specify the users who have access to the document the UserNames property must be used. To specify that everyone can edit a certain region the user name must be an empty string. Events occur, when an editable region is created (EditableRegionCreated), deleted (EditableRegionDeleted), entered (EditableRegionEntered) or left (EditableRegionLeft). An editable region is highlighted on the screen. By default the highlight color depends on the user name, but it can be set to a certain value with the EditableRegion.HighlightColor property. In protected documents with editable regions editing and formatting is possible or not depending on the current text input position. The new properties CanEdit, CanCharacterFormat, CanParagraphFormat and CanTableFormat informs about editing and formatting possiblilities and should be used to enable or disable menu items and buttons for the end-user. To provide a user-interface for specifying restrictions and adding editable regions, the Windows.Forms.Ribbon.RibbonPermissionsTab and WPF.RibbonPermissionsTab have been added to the number of predefined ribbon tabs.

Windows Automation

The TXTextControl WPF control implements now the text pattern interface of the Windows UI Automation technology the purpose of which is to expose rich information about the text of a loaded document through text ranges. Developers of accessibility tools can use this information to create software that makes applications running on Windows more accessible to people with vision, hearing, or motion disabilities.

Mini-Toolbars

In addition to context menus Text Control now offers built-in mini-toolbars. A mini-toolbar is a contextual toolbar showing elements to format the document depending on the current context. They are shown either when the right mouse button is released or when the left mouse button is released and text is selected. This can be controlled with the ShowMiniToolbar property. Depending on the area, where the mouse button has been clicked a mini-toolbar with standard options for this area is shown. There is a mini-toolbar for standard text formatting with additional items when the text is in a table and a toolbar with formatting options for images, textframes, drawings and barcodes. Before a built-in mini-toolbar is shown, a MiniToolbarOpening event occurs. This event can be used to alter or to expand the predefined toolbar, to provide a custom toolbar or to completely suppress the toolbar.

Windows Forms Ribbon Controls

The TXTextControl Windows Forms ribbon library offers now a better support for chart formatting. The RibbonInsertTab provides a gallery for selecting a chart type and the RibbonFrameLayoutTab has been extended to set general chart layout features. Furthermore, the new RibbonChartLayoutTab can be used to set the chart's data, title, legend, axis titles and grid lines. With an automatic connection to a RibbonReportingTab data relations can be specified with an built-in dialog box.

Selection of Objects in the Background

The new TextControl.SelectObjects property controls the selection of objects which are located behind the text. When this property is set to true, a mouse click selects the object in the background. Otherwise, when this property is set to false, text in front of the object is selected. The RibbonFormattingTab has been extended with a Select Objects button.

Pagination in Tables

By setting pagination options an end-user can control where a TextControl position automatic page breaks. The pagination settings 'keep with next' and 'page break before' can now be used in tables to control a page break in a table. Because a table row consists of several paragraphs, the first paragraph of a table row determines how to treat the complete row. The pagination options of all other paragraphs are ignored. If the first paragraph of a table row has the 'page break before' setting the complete table row is moved to a new page. If the first paragraph of a table row has the 'keep with next' setting the complete table row is positioned on the same page as its following table row.

Web Editor

A new ribbon tab dedicated to chart design and a new ribbon group on the 'Frame Formatting' tab containing general chart frame layout features have been added. It is now possible to copy content from the web editor to the client clipboard in HTML format. The preferred clipboard (client or server) can be selected via a new button on the 'Home' ribbon tab or with the JavaScript API.

Web Editor Programming

The JavaScript API has been enhanced. It is now possible to retrieve and manipulate text fields, application fields and sub text parts and to load and save user dictionaries. Events concerning the current state of clipboard content transfer from the server to the client as well as changes of the text view location and the zoom factor have been added.

Thesaurus

TX Text Control now supports synonyms which helps finding alternative words. The RibbonProofingTab now provides two new buttons to load specific thesaurus files from a selected directory and to open the built-in ThesaurusDialog. It provides synoynms at the current text input position. To use the thesaurus feature TX Spell.NET 7.0 must be installed.

.NET Framework

TX Text Control 25.0 has been compiled with .NET Framework 4.0. TX Text Control 25.0 for WPF has been compiled with .NET Framework 4.5.