What's New in TX Text Control ActiveX 30.0

With version 30.0, end users of TX Text Control ActiveX comment on parts of a document, and text gets automatic subscripts and superscripts, capitals, small capitals, character spacing and character scaling. What follows covers these features and every property, method and event that version 30.0 added since version 29.0.

Version 30.0 was released in November 2021, together with TX Text Control .NET Server, TX Text Control .NET for Windows Forms, TX Text Control .NET for WPF and TX Spell .NET 9.0.

New Features

• Extended character attributes. TXTextControl now supports automatic subscript and superscript settings, text effects with uppercase letters and a user-defined character spacing and scaling. The new properties AutoBaseLine, Capitals, CharacterSpacing and CharacterScaling define or retrieve these settings.

  • Automatic subscript and superscript. The font is scaled and moved above or below the baseline by values the font itself defines. When a font doesn't define them, TXTextControl scales it to 50% and moves it 40% above or 15% below the baseline.
  • Special subscripts and superscripts. In addition to standard subscript and superscript, TXTextControl offers subscripts aligned at the baseline and superscripts that don't extend above the ascender line. They serve for the numerators and denominators of diagonal fractions, such as the Spanish c/u (cada uno), and for ordinal indicators, such as the English 1st. All automatic subscript and superscript features can be combined with a user-defined baseline position, set with the BaseLine property.
  • Capitals and small capitals. Lowercase letters are displayed either as capital letters of the same size or as smaller capital letters. The smaller size is either the size of the lowercase "x" (petite caps) or the size of the lowercase "x" plus 10% (small caps).
  • Character spacing. A user-defined fixed value is added to each character. A negative value reduces the character spacing, any other value extends it.
  • Character scaling. Character widths are scaled, specified in percent of the average character width.
  • Styles, dialog boxes and filters. All new character attributes are also attributes of formatting styles: the Style object has corresponding new properties. The font and formatting style dialog boxes have been extended to make the attributes available to the end user, and all text filters have been extended to exchange them with other applications.

• Comments. Parts of a document can now be commented.

  • In the user interface. An end user selects a piece of text and opens a comment input control through the context menu to type the comment's text. When the input control is closed, with a mouse click or the Enter key, the comment is added to the document. The commented text is highlighted on the screen in a color that depends on the user; the default color for the current user is red. The comment's context menu offers entries to change, remove and reply to a comment.
  • In code. CommentInsert, CommentReply and CommentEdit open the comment input control. Every comment of a document has a unique identifier, and CommentNext enumerates them.
  • Users and times. Each comment has a creation time and is related to a user. A new comment is associated with the current user, the first in the list of users set with the UserNames property. When the list is empty, CommentUserName is set to an empty string, which stands for an unknown user.
  • Replies. Comments can have replies, which are also contained in the list of comments. A reply is associated with the same piece of text, but it can be related to another user and have another creation time. CommentReplies retrieves an array with the identifiers of all replies to a comment. Removing the original comment from the document removes all its replies.
  • Events. Events occur when a comment is created (CommentCreated) or deleted (CommentDeleted) or its text is changed (CommentChanged). Further events occur when the current input position has been moved to a commented piece of text (CommentedTextEntered) or has left it (CommentedTextLeft).
  • File formats. Comments are saved and reloaded with the TX Text Control format (.tx), the Rich Text Format (.rtf) and the Microsoft Word formats (.doc, .docx).

  

• Formatting styles. The character input language can now be specified as an attribute of character and paragraph formatting styles. The formatting style dialog box and all text filters have been extended to support it, and the new Style.Locale property sets a style's language in code.

New Properties, Methods and Events

Version 30.0 adds members to TXTextControl and to the Style object.

Properties

Methods

Events

Related Pages

• Version 31.0: signature fields and built-in dialog boxes.
• Version 29.0: tables of contents and the update to MFC 12.0.
• Commenting a document: all members for comments.
• Character Formatting: the members for character attributes.
• What's New: the changes of every TX Text Control ActiveX version.