Zugg Software :: View topic

Posted: Sat Jul 03, 2004 9:03 pm

This is the thread to announce the status of the next version of Zeus.

What I'm working on in this version is the <MEMO> component to turn it into a feature-rich editor component, suitable for use as the Email Creation and Editing component for eMobius.

The author of the TRichView component successfully integrated the Addict spellchecker for the as-you-type spellchecking. I have now integrated these changes into the <MEMO> component and have tied into all of the features of the TRichView component.

This component is a *powerful* word processing editor. It works very much like Microsoft Word or any other professional editor. There is an optional <RULER> component that you can place on your form and tie with the <MEMO> component to provide the standard word processing ruler functions, such as margin setting and tab setting.

The <MEMO> component itself handles everything internally as a enhanced rich-text format. There are "no loss" Open/Save file formats of RVF (the extended RTF) and XML for use as a standalone file editor. It also supports Open/Import of RTF, TXT, HTML (but no CSS support currently) and DOC (two versions of Microsoft Word formats). It can also open *any* file and will extract any of the text found in that file.

For Save/Export it supports RTF, TXT, HTML (both a "simple" and "full" HTML output. "Full" uses CSS), and two versions of DOC output.

The component supports images in the format: BMP, GIF, JPG, PNG. It has an infinite undo/redo buffer that handles undoing all edits, including table/cell edits.

There is full table support with table editing features on par with Microsoft Word or Frontpage. The HTML Output is *very* good and produces HTML that looks exactly like what you create on the screen. Tables fully support all HTML table features including cell-specific colors, images, borders, etc. It also supports background images and colors for the entire document. Cells in tables can be merged and split, and there is a good user interface for changing row/column sizes, selecting parts of the table, etc.

There is full control over fonts and paragraphs, with paragraph colors and borders and variable line spacing.

The downside is that the HTML Import does not support CSS, so when you read an existing HTML file, it doesn't sometimes look like it is supposed to. So it currently does not work well as a full HTML creation/editing tool. I plan to do a lot of work myself on the HTML importer to improve this for the future since I need a good HTML import feature in order to handle HTML email in eMobius.

All of the rich text stuff can be disabled if you just want to use <MEMO> as a simple fixed-font text output control.

About the only thing I have found "subpar" is the handling of images with text wrapping. Currently an image takes up the entire line and there is no way to wrap text around it like Microsoft Word does. The work around is to create a table and put the image in a table cell.

I have also added the <COMBOBOX> and <SPINEDIT> components to Zeus and set it up so that you can use a combobox to select/change the font in a <MEMO> and you can use a <SPINEDIT> to select/change the font size in a <MEMO>.

All of the above currently works and I have expanded the "editor.zml" demo application to support all of it. Here is what I'm still planning to add before the next release:

1) ANSI Import: This would allow you to read an ANSI log file created in zMUD into the <MEMO> component (and you could then save it as HTML for example).

2) Fixed buffer support: The ability to set the <MEMO> component to display a certain number of maximum lines and when more text is received the oldest lines are discarded. This would allow the <MEMO> component to work as a real-time logging window where the previous N lines are displayed and it doesn't keep using up more and more memory.

3) Multiple file support: The ability to add a tab-sheet to your form and have multiple files open, one per tab. It will be able to color a tab red when the file has been changed and not saved.

4) A Color selection component: A button with a pulldown menu for setting colors that can be used to easily set various color properties of other components in Zeus.

With my current schedule, it's possible you will see this next release late next week. But if I'm not able to get it all working, I will be gone for 3 days next weekend so that might delay the release until the following week.

Today I'm planning to do some documentation and work on some web site stuff since I only have a partial day before we do some 4th of July stuff tomorrow.

Anyway, the editor component is really amazing and I'm sure people with come up with some nice applications that use it. Just as a Notepad/Memopad replacement it is already awesome. Not bad for just a "demo" application Wink