HomeProductsWPTools5

WPTools® VCL is a suite of native Delphi/C++Builder components to create and edit formatted text. (Delphi 5, 6, 7, 2005, 2006, 2007, BCB 5, 6, 2006 - Win32)

WPTools is much more than a replacement for the Delphi richedit component: the central part is a complete WYSIWYG word processing component which is surprisingly small. In contrast to similar components WPTools supports editable header and footer in its perfect page layout modes, zooming, splitscreen, tables, also with the possibility of page breaks inside table rows and a powerful CSS like paragraph style concept.

It supports a variety of different character and paragraph attributes, stylesheets, numbering and bullets.
Plus, it supports bookmarks, embedded images (with text wrap around) and table of contents.

If you need to di mass mailing or to provide your customers with a customizable database view you will enjoy working with the powerful "mail merge" facility. WPTools works with special field objects (start and end markes) which makes it possible to dynamically update the text or to read out selected parts of the document, so it is also possible to use it with forms for data entry.

WPTools Version 5

Internally the WPTools VCL is based on XML like data structures and is completely object oriented. The main engine, reader and writer - altogether more than 80% of the source - was rewritten completely for Version 5.

The engine of WPTools 5 was optimized for word processing. Unlike some competing products it supports page breaks in table rows. The text loading routines are very fast. The concept also allows it to create reader and writer units for custom formats.

Please check out the online version of the manual to get a quick overview over the API.

WPTools includes an interface to add spell checking components. This interface is used by some 3rd party components and also by our own spellcheck addon WPSpell.

Also available: ReportBuilder(tm) Interface (=Report engine by Digital Metaphors).
This makes it possible to preview and print WPTools texts which were integrated in your ReportBuilder reports.

Now also optionally available is support for FastReport and QuickReport 4.

Note: If you use our product wPDF to export your reports to PDF, the WPTools generated output will be exported as text and vector graphics, not as bitmaps.

How do our customers use WPTools ?

Our swiss customer Generali is using WPTools 5 and wPDF to print a very complicated form. The form is based on tables with merged cells and merged rows. It also contains images and narrow fonts. (Screenshot:Complicated RTF form ). A german customer uses WPTools 5 in an advanced medical word processor (Screenshot:Word Processor )

Sample documented with tables - printed by our word processing engine

WPReporter - included in the "Bundle"

The optional WPReporter (included in WPTools Bundle) makes it easy to create lists and tables under program control. The output is based on a template which can be edited at runtime and the data retrieved by an event.

Also included in the "Bundle" is a component to add calculation to the WPTools 5 tables. This makes the creation of invoices a breeze. The formulas can use values from other cells which are relatively referenced - so if the user inserts a row into the table the calculation still works.


wPDF + WPTools - a perfect team

Using wPDF you get high quality PDF output. Embedded JPEG images are inserted as the are, without additional de/compression. Images in headers or footers are automatically only inserted one time and used multiple times - WPTools and wPDF work hand in hand. We offer an attractive bundle prince for WPTools + wPDF.

Links
Downloads --- WPSpell --- Example Applications --- Manual --- Reference --- Order --- License


Latest technology - get it with WPTools 5

WPTools 5 was almost completely written from scratch - although most of the types and names which were used in our popular WPTools version 4 have been reused to make upgrading easier, the core is based on a new concept. We decided to go this way since we wanted to support the latest technology and solve the needs of our customers who need to fulfill the needs of the more and more demanding end users. WPTools uses the latest compiler features such as dynamic arrays, method overloading and optional parameters and so requires Delphi 5, 6, 7, 2005, 2006 or C++Builder 5 and 6. Pointers have been eliminated except for a few methods where they are optionally used for superior performance.
The memory concept of WPTools is based on the ideas of XML/CSS - this means the paragraphs are arranged in a tree - attributes can be retrieved from the current paragraph element, the parents or the assigned style.
WPTools 5 has been designed to also work in a threadsave enviroment. We included a demo project which performs mail merge in several paralell tasks.

loaded RTF reference


Feature Overview

Pagenumber hints while scrolling Automatically a hint window is displayed when the scrollbar is moved. This halpes the user to find the correct page,. This feature can be switched off and the text can be customized using the global variable WPPageHintStr.

  

Introduction - Why WPTools?

    

Feature List - Quick overview to compare different WPTools editions

    

WYSIWYG WPTools 5 will always work in WYSIWYG mode, this means the printed output will always match the output you saw in the editor. Internally WPTools measures the text in a high resolution - so it is printed in a high quality. When printers are changed this does NOT change the word wrap or page breaks!

  

Multiview (splitscreen) technology WPTools 5 strictly separates the text data structures from the output logic. This makes it possible to show the same text using an editor and a preview component. Even more impressive it is possible to edit the same text using different editors!

  

Image Support WPTools supports embedded images. The images can be handled as a character or linked to paragraph or to a page with relative positioning. Text wrapping is possible on left or right side and also on both sides!

  

File Formats WPTools saves and loads text in ANSI, RTF, HTML/CSS and its own native "WPTools" format. But you can also add custom reader and writer classes or modify the existing classes. The native WPTools format is close to HTML which makes it indexable by indexing procedures which are able to skip HTML tags.

  

Headers and Footers Headers and footers can be loaded and saved in RTF or WPT format. They can be different for the first, the odd and the even pages. It is also possible to select header and footer using an event - this makes it easy to have multiple headers and footers in one text.

  

Section Support WPTools 5 can handle text sections. This means there can be different header and footers in the text, also different page sizes or orientation. The WPReporter will create a multi section document if the template contained section breaks.

  

Different text attributes This component supports the paragraph and character attributes you are used to ... and a lot more. The concept of WPTools 5 allows a consistent support for paragraph styles.

  

Text styles (stylesheet) The core of WPTools has been optimized to work with styles - it was built from scratch using concepts also used by HTML/CSS

  

Tables In WPTools 5 tables one cell can contain multiple paragraphs and even other tables. The height of a row can exceed he length of a page since, unlike some competing products, WPTools 5 supports page breaks in table rows.

  

Repeated header and footer rows Only WPTools 5 has the ability to repeat certain rows of a table at the start and the end of a page. These rows can be used to display life (!) sub totals if you use the calculation feature included in the WPReporter addon.

  

Sub Paragraphs Just another unique feature of WPTools 5: Texts from different sources can be displayed in one window similar to the display in a TDBControlGrid. This makes it possible to use just one editor to edit text which is stored in multiple data base fields or -records.

  

Label printing with WPTools WPTools 5 includes a powerful component to print booklets and labels. We also added a form which can be included in your application using only a few lines of code. This label printing tool even loads and saves the definition of the label format to a XML file.

  

Syntax Highlighting WPTools 5 includes the component TWPSynEditHighlight which has been created to use the SynEdit (http://SynEdit.SourceForge.net) syntax highlighter with WPTools 5. This makes it possible to show the syntax of about 30 different languages, including Pascal, Java c++ and SQL!

  

External pages and watermarks Unique feature which makes it possible to integrate other pages into the preview/editor pages and are painted in an event. While the text sayes editable the pages are not. This is great to combine reporter output with letters in one preview.

  

Mailmerge (dynamic update of fields) "Mail Merge" means the automatic update of data fields in any document. It can be used to do mass mailing or to create customizable database record views.<br> With WPTools merge fields are not destroyed by the merge process, the field data can be exchanged as soon as it changes. So it is possible to scroll through a database with a merge letter being "attached".<br> It is also possible to read out the contents of the merge field. So the document can be also used as data entry from. Text can be merged as ANSI, RTF and HTML text. Also images can be updated.

  

Forms WPTools can be also used to create forms. These are sepecial texts which are generally protected. The user may only edit the text in specially marked areas.

  

EditBox modes Sometimes you need to create forms with editor boxes resized automatically to match their contents. WPTools 5 can do this for both, the height and the width...

  

Dialogs are included WPTools comes with a set of dialogs, such as the property disalogs for paragraph indents and spacing, tabstops and borders. There is a dialog to change the page size, to define a numbering style or to create a paragraph style.

  

Database Connectivity The WPTools editor can be easily used with databases. The mail merge can also load the field data from a database automatically.

    

Notes for upgrades from WPTools V4 Due to the changed data structures it is not possible to simply replace WPTools 4 with WPTools 5 although we are trying to make the upgrade as smooth as possible....

    

Conclusion

WPTools 5 was built to be the most powerful word processor available on the component market. In addition, it also works as a HTML editor, offering convenient word processing features, while still working as closely to the HTML document model as possible. But please note that te HTML support requires and import/export algorithm which does not handle all possible features of HTML and/or CSS. The optional WPReporter makes it easy to create complicated documents from templates and data.

Link to Multi-Demo

VCL Product Multi-Demo

WPTools+wPDF+WPViewPDF