Alex,

> It was nice to meet you Whilfest, Rick. I will not get back to my office till after thanksgiving,
> and am thinking of purchasing your product then.

It was great meeting you in person as well. It's always good to meet the people behind the screen/keyboard face to face. It was the first time I also got to talk to George Tasker in person as well. I'm glad you stopped by the booth to look at the control I've been working really hard on. It definitely helps keep you adrenaline flowing and your drive going, when you get really good feedback from the community.


> To clarify, the engine is royalty free if I include it within my app, right?

Yes, the tool is Royalty Free for bundling with your applications. You are not allowed to ship the tool to Developers or to ship your Development License LIC file with the control. I was trying to work on a way of not requiring an LIC file for development but I couldn't come up with a good protection mechanism. So you will have to subclass the control for use in your apps. I will make it as easy as possible though. Also, I am going to be adding some events to the control that you will then be able to respond to as well which will add more capabilities to the engine as well. VFP 8 makes it a lot easier with the BINDEVENTS, but for now you can just subclass the control. I've had to do that for years with my DBI controls.


> Suggestions: offer export to text, Word, Excel and DBF at the same time as PDF so user
> can simply choose output file format. Also, emphasize how useful your large zoom capability is when viewing maps.

Eventually, I plan to add Exports to RTF which you could then import into Word or any other word processor for that matter. I don't know that I will do a specific Word export or not after talking it over with Doug Hennig. The RTF will be easiest for now. I did discuss Excel export with another person at Whilfest as well and I was trying to figure out how you would do that anyway with all of the formatting etc. He actually said that the important thing was to export the actual formulas to Excel and format column widths and fonts etc. Not so much the page oriented output.

I'm also considering a simplistic PDF Import into my control which would make it sort of like an Adobe PDF Viewer on Steroids. Since my new Find function that I wrote on the way home from Whilfest can Highlight EVERY OCCURRENCE of the word in the Report Preview and only added 2 extra lines of code for displaying purposes so there isn't any Speed Loss at all.

I'm right now cleaning up support for more VFP Report Trickery to make the output look as close to VFP as possible. I'll probably leave out the known VFP Report bugs though and just do it the correct way! <bg>