« Scrollbar Elasticity … | Home | Goodbye Salzburg »

DynaPDF and Styled Text, Xojo vs. FileMaker

Another idea I got on the FileMaker Conference here in Salzburg: Users may want to have a text field with styled text and transfer that text as good as possible into a PDF page via DynaPDF.

The Xojo framework provides a StyledText class where we can query text styles (italic, bold and underline), color, font and font size. Via the paragraph class, we get alignment information, too.

The FileMaker plugin SDK offers functions to query styled text. But I have to query style for each character and detect the runs myself (see feature request). It does provide some more styles, e.g. strikeout. But it does not provide alignment information (see feature request).

The plugin can now convert styled text as good as we can to format commands in DynaPDF. WriteFText/WriteFTextEx functions can process various commands and we can easily support different fonts, alignment, color, styles and even more features.

In FileMaker the example looks like this:

MBS FileMaker Plugin with Styled Text to PDF

As you see we have the input field on the top left, the translated commands for review on top right and the final PDF as preview below.

And in Xojo I made a text editor with live preview:

MBS Xojo Plugin with Styled Text to PDF

For the Create PDF button to write a PDF you only need the DynaPDF Starter version. But for live preview with rendering a page, we need a Pro license. whenever you change something in the left text area, we update a few milliseconds later the preview on the right side. The page size is set to match the canvas size, so you get an unscaled high DPI preview.
As you see we have alignment only in Xojo, but strikeout only in FileMaker.

PS: Available soon in plugin version 6.5pr3 or by email now.
16 10 16 - 11:10