Thursday, August 17, 2006

New XFRX version is out (12.0)

The final release has just been released. I would like to thank to everyone who participated in the beta versions evaluation. The feedback was very valuable for us.

The new version contains 3 new output types (various flavours of OpenOffice), unicode support in PDF (so Chinese, Korean and Japanese character sets, as well as multiple code pages within one document are now supported).

Another significant change is the completely reworked previewer. I have finally abandoned the idea of using foxpro native visual objects to render the page (although it actually seemed to be a good idea when I was beginning the works on the previewer :) ) - it was just too slow (the biggest complaint about the previewer) and the layout wasn't 100% accurate due to differences between GDI and GDI+.

So, the previewer is now using GDI+ to render the page. It is much faster (moving from one page to another should be about 50 times faster now), the layout is exactly the same as the printed output and it also supports unicode and rotation (even in VFP 6).

The biggest complication here for me was to prevent my dlls calls and the native VFP routines from fighting on who's going to be refresing the form, result of which was often various flickering, slow or incomplete refreshing, etc., which was also the main reason of the two beta versions prior the final release. I hope you will like the result :).

The 2nd biggest complaint about the previewer was the slowness of the searching feature - it was somewhat unusable for documents with 100+ pages.
The speed has been improved significantly, and also the design has changed a bit. The whole document is now searched and the results are displayed in the side bar on the left (where bookmarks are normally displayed). You can click on the individual search result entries to navigate to the corresponding places in the document.

Ver. 12.0 Release notes | Download | Documentation

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