Hey all,

I have been looking into re-tooling our imaging application. It is horrendously over-designed both in the data model and in the objects used to manipulate the data. It also was built as a COM object (even though it mainly is just a visual form run interactively and it never gets manipulated externally other than to start it out) and uses several OCXes for image viewing.

So, I am simplifying the data model, rewriting the code (as a straight executable), and want to get rid of any third-party OCXes.

I started by making an image viewer screen, and it is wonderful. Problem is, the graphics (TIF images) look very grainy unless the zoom factor is high. Compared to virtually every other graphic viewer on my system (fax viewer, MS Photo app, existing imaging system utilizing Pegasus OCX), the characters are choppy and jagged. These other viewers have much smoother graphics (looks antialiased) and documents are almost completely legible even at extreme zoom-outs. This is useful because our scanner room looks at the documents for file numbers so that they can classify the images appropriately. If they can make out the file numbers from non-zoomed pics, then they can move faster through their batches. As it stands with my new viewer, they would have to zoom in more and move around the images, taking away valuable keystrokes and mouse movements.

I know that the image control in VFP is now basically a GDI+ wrapper. Are there some GDI API commands I can use to smooth out the graphics or enhance image quality? Does the Image Control have a graphic context handle on it to use with these other DLLs (kind of like hWnd on forms for using windowing API commands)?

I really need to be able to make this image viewer bulletproof and high-quality, and the more home-grown I can make it, the better I can integrate it to our other systems with fewer interface issues and/or errors.

Thanks for reading.