Hi,

Looked at the preview looked great any idea of the price... I'm interested ..

jp



>Mark,
>
>I Doug Hennig was planning on releasing a new version of his reporting tool this summer. It was due out in June or July. I spoke to him a few months ago to show him what I had been working on as a replacement for the Report Preview and I will be soon working again on my Report Designer to replace the current one. My Report Preview is an ActiveX control for displaying reports on the screen. It will be used in conjunction with my report engine that I am writing which replaces the current VFP report engine for doing special features. I am still nailing down what all I want to put into Version 1.0 of the Report Engine. For one I can do rotated text as well as having the ability to have different form sizes all within the same report. The Report Preview is based upon using Adobe Acrobat viewer with the exception that is much faster. It can ZOOM to 100,000%. However, it is not very useful at that size but seeing a 10 point font scroll down the screen at about 4 foot in size is impressive.
>:-)
>
>Plus, on a whim I thought why not add a PDF Export to the control. So whatever you pump into the control can then be saved to PDF WITHOUT the need of having an Adobe PDF Writer or any other PDF Printer Driver on your system. I am just about to get the printing options cleaned up on it and the control will be done. I do need to add my AddImage() method to the control but I do have an AddBarcode() method which will PAINT a barcode at the desired location and rotation without requiring to have any Barcode fonts as well. At the moment it only supports TrueType fonts and not Adobe Type 1 fonts. Since it is an ActiveX control it can be placed in a top level form without any problems. Also, the entire report resides in RAM and therefore more than one report can be loaded at once. When I get to it the engine will support adding in SubReports even after a report has been generated.
>
>You can preview it at: http://www.mindseyeinc.com/VFPTools/ReportPreview
>
>I plan to be shipping it before Devcon. I am well on track at the moment. One of the tough ones was having to write the code to properly determine font widths when generating PDF files because there is no UNDERSCORE or STRIKEOUT font commands in PDF. You have to draw lines at the proper locations which means reading all of the font information use GetGlyphOutline() API calls and calculating font widths and UNDERSCORE thickness/postion and STRIKEOUT thickness/position, etc. I've learned a lot writing this one and hit a lot of undocumented or poor examples of how to do things as well. Nothing like beating your head against the wall to start or end your day. Thank god for triathlon training and weight lifiting for venting.
>
>Anyway this is in no way a replacement for FoxFire but it will be an improvement to the Report Preview and Report Engine capabilities and eventually I will replace the Report Designer as well to make it easier to use. I'll try to get a feature list posted sometime today so you can see what else it does. I can print ALL PAGES, EVEN PAGES or ODD PAGES as well as scale the output. But, you may want to check out Doug Hennig's site to see what he is up to.