I am trying to persuade my customers to switch from Microsoft Word to a word processor embedded in my application which uses WPTools. The problem I am having is that they do not like the way pages are displayed on the screen.
Unless I am misunderstanding something, we have two choices: we can either display using screen resolution (wpfAlwaysFormatWithScreenRes) or we can display at printer resolution. Neither of these is good enough. With screen resolution, the text (and graphics) look good, but the page layout is wrong. Line breaks and page breaks are in the wrong places and do not represent the way the document will be printed. With printer resolution the line breaks and page breaks are in the correct places, but the text looks awful with irregular and strange placing of characters within the word. Moreover, photographs are distorted when they are re-scaled back to screen resolution using rather crude bitmap scaling rather than proper jpeg software.
The reason why printer resolution looks so bad is that the paint engine (in effect) tries to place each individual character as close as possible to its actual position on the page, but because the pixel matrix is not fine enough, some characters are shifted left and others are shifted right. These adjustments can result in letters which appear to crash into one another and spaces in the middle of words which appear as wide as the spaces between the words.
Both modes are imperfect and my customers are not prepared to compromise as MS Word does not suffer from these problems.
The reason why MS Word appears better is that it cheats. It does not attempt to display the page exactly as it will be printed, but rather shows an approximate layout with the correct page and line breaks, but without getting too accurate about exact word and character placement.
Please can we have a similar option within WPTools that combines the best of both options. This should works as follows: The printer resolution should be used to calculate where the line breaks and page brakes need to be. The screen resolution is then used to display the page. Where necessary pixels can be added or removed from the inter-word spaces and between paragraphs to balance the page.
WPTools is a fantastic product, but without these changes, it looks very crude when compared to MS Word.