VPE 4 VDF

Features in VPE:
VPE comes in 3 different flavors (editions). Standard, Enhanced and professional.

VPE Standard Edition

The standard edition includes all the standard text functions, drawing functions, printer device control, printing management functions and more.

Some of the hightlights include

Fully configurable Preview window

• optional preview. Documents can be printed without preview.
• Preview can either be a main window or embedded into your applications windows.
• Preview can be shown while the document or report is generated.
• Toolbar, Status bar and rulers can be fully configures. You can hide either one of them even single buttons can be shown or hidden. The unit of measure can be changed from centimeters to inches
• The preview supports 11 different languages. English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Portuguese.
• Goto page feature.
• Text can be shown in the status bar. Optional a progressbar can be shown instead.

Saving documents/reports
Any VPE document can be saved as a .VPE file. VPE comes with a freely distributable viewer that allows anybody to view your documents or reports without needing your application. This feature also allows you to archive reports exactly the way they where printed.

Email and Fax
VPE can easily fax and email documents. This can either be done programatically or by the user by clicking the email button in the preview.

Internet
VPE comes with an ActiveX control that can be used inside the web browser. This way you can even distribute documents or reports online on the internet.

No Royalties
VPE can be distributed up to 10000 times with your application

Rendering
Rendering is a very important feature. It allows you to pretend to print something but instead all VPE does is to calculate the size needed and page break information.
This information can then be used to format your documents.

Image formats in Standard Edition

• imports the image formats: BMP, WMF and EMF
• Special caching feature for images

support of lines, polylines, polygons, frames, boxes, circles, ellipses, pies, text, true-color and hatching

automatic word break

can break long text automatically over multiple pages

intelligent printer setup
manages an unlimited number of user-defined printer setups for different document-types and printers in a network

VPE Enhanced Edition

The enhanced edition includes all features of the standard edition plus the following features.

Enhanced Image formats

• improved BMP Support (RLE & OS/2)
• TIFF (6.0, Fax G3, Fax G4, LZW, Packbits, Multipage, RGB and Grayscale)
• GIF
• JPEG
• PNG
• PCX
• DXF
• DXF files can be forced to black and white representation
• Supports Multi-Page TIFF: query number of pages and select one

Rotation of bitmap-images in 90 degree steps

21 Barcode-Types supported:
(EAN-13, EAN-8, EAN-13+2, EAN-13+5, EAN-8+2, EAN-8+5, EAN-128A, EAN-128B, EAN-128C, UPC-A, UPC-A+2, UPC-A+5, UPC-E, UPC-E+2, UPC-E+5, Codabar, Code 39 Code 93, 2 of 5, Interleaved 2 of 5, POSTNET (1.20) )

VPE Professional Edition

The professional edition includes all features of the enhanced edition plus the following features.

Rich Text Format (RTF)
Interprets RTF directly and imports RTF files. VPE supports a subset of RTF.

Charts
VPE supports all basic types of charts using SmartChart technology.

UDO - User Defined Objects
Access to VPE's Device Context. This allows to print and preview any kind of drawing or object, including OLE/COM objects!!!

Interactive Objects
Objects can be made clickable by assigning them a unique Object ID. Moving with the mouse over such an object changes the cursor to a pointing hand. If you click onto such an object your application receives an event containing the Object ID. Then you could for example open a separate dialog, showing more detailed information about the clicked text or image.

Scale-To-Gray Technology
A high resolution image (with for example 300 or 600 DPI) scaled down to the screen preview (which is usually a 96 DPI device) is looking bad due to the nature of the scaling algorithm. The reason is, that pixels are left out when drawing such a high resolution image to the screen.

Example: If you draw a 300 DPI image to a 96 DPI screen, the image is scaled down by a factor of 96 / 300 = 0.32. This means, only 32% of all pixels are drawn, the rest is left out. (i.e. after each pixel that is drawn, 2 pixels are left out)

What the Scale-to-Gray Technology does:
The Scale-to-Gray Technology is especially useful for displaying forms on the screen, because a grayscale image is scaled down to the low screen resolution, while the loss of visual information (the pixels, that are left out) is transformed to gray-values of different intensity (brightness). This produces perfect readability for the human eye. Additionally, together with the Scale-to-Gray Technology you can use two different images for the same page: one for the screen (preview) in low resolution (see VpeSetViewable), and one for printing (see VpeSetPrintable) in the original high resolution. Therefore you gain perfect readability on the screen as well as on the printouts.

Normal scaled image

Scale to gray

Image Export
Export of single pages or parts of pages as:

• BMP
• WMF
• EMF (EMF: only 32-Bit Version)
• JPEG
• PNG
• TIFF (6.0, Fax G3, Fax G4, LZW, Packbits, Multipage, RGB and Grayscale)
• GIF
• PCX

For all bitmap formats you can specify the color depth and the resolution (in DPI). Additionally dithering is possible.

Character Placement
You can specify a constant offset from one character to another for text objects in 0.1 mm resolution. This is very good for filling in forms that have pre-printed columns for each letter.

Object Visibility
Objects (like text, images, barcodes, etc.) can be set to printable only, i.e. they are not shown in the preview but they are printed. Vice versa objects can be set to viewable only, i.e. they are shown in the preview (for example as hint or comment) but they are not printed.
This is also very useful, if you display a bitmap form: for the preview you display a Scale-to-Gray form for better readability (set to viewable only) and for printing you use a 600 DPI hi-resolution bitmap for perfect printing (set to printable only). Both images together can be put onto the same page in the VPE document.

For more information regarding VPE visit IdealSoftware's web site at http://www.idealsoftware.com.

VPE Enterprise Edition

The Enterprise edition includes all the features of the Professional edition plus the following features and one license of dycodoc the visual design tool for VPE.

The Enterprise Edition is brandnew! It is shipped together with the visual designer dycodoc.
The name dycodoc is derived from the notion "Dynamic Content Documents".

In addition to the pure generation of layouts by program code, you can use dycodoc in order to create layout templates by point-and-click. The templates created with dycodoc are stored in files, which are processed by the engine of the Enterprise Edition.

At present, dycodoc can be used for the creation of forms and documents only. Lists and tables will be supported in a later release.

dycodoc is an MDI application of highest quality. It uses most modern software technologies and a superior user interface. dycodoc's capabilities are outstanding: you - as well as your end-users - will feel its professionality and power from the first moment on.

In fact, dycodoc is our master-piece: from the first day, when we carefully designed the C++ class layout for VPE in late 1993, we had this application as final goal in mind! The C++ printing, streaming and presentation classes, as well as the complete objects (i.e. text, images, barcodes, lines, etc.), which are used inside of VPE are by 100% re-used in dycodoc - this is the art of object oriented programming! Beside the fact, that this is a good proof for the quality of our programming :-) it has a main advantage for you: everything you layout in dycodoc is 100% identical to what you will get in VPE, because the executed code is the same!

dycodoc can be used for three different tasks:

• Template Creation
  Templates contain the layout of a document. They can be loaded into VPE, values can be assigned by code to fields (i.e. variables) and finally the templates can be inserted into a VPE document.

• Source Code Generation
  The layout can be exported to source code for all major programming languages. The source code consists of language-specific calls to VPE which reproduce the layout. For technical reasons, the source code generation is in some ways restricted compared to the use of templates.
  However, also users of the Standard, Enhanced and Professional Editions can take profit by using dycodoc (even if using the trial version!) in order to create source code.

• VPE Document File Editor
  VPE itself is able to write documents to file (for example with the method WriteDoc). Now you and your end-users can load those VPE files into dycodoc and edit them!
  Moreover, you can create new VPE document files from scratch with dycodoc and load them easily into VPE with ReadDoc. This is very useful if you want to create quickly a static part of a document (for example a letterhead) which will be used during document creation with VPE.

 

dycodoc Screen Shot :

There are many important points to say about dycodoc, but for now we will mention the two most important here:

1. Despite the fact, that dycodoc will dramatically break down your development time, it is especially designed as a powerful tool for your end-users to create and edit forms and VPE documents. It has the ability of managing multiple layers per page, which may have different access rights.

So you may edit layers during the development phase, and lock them for editing by end-users, whilst other layers may be modified. The layer technology is also very helpful if you have a background layout (for example a form bitmap), which shall not disturb the editing process. Just put it into another layer and lock it - so it cannot be selected! By drag and drop, you are able to move a layer to another z-order or to another page. The contents of layers can also be hidden, which is can be very helpful during the editing.

For the use of access rights, dycodoc offers a user and user-group management facility. dycodoc knows three different types of user-groups:

• Administrator (may maintain users)
• Developer (may maintain specific rights for documents and layers)
• User

Moreover, it is possible to execute dycodoc with commandline parameters from your application, specifying a user name / password and therefore a specific configuration and specific access rights for a session. So, beside of having a pre-configured session, you are able to extend any existing user management from your software to dycodoc.

 

2. The other very important property of dycodoc is the way you - or your end-users - may work with fields. Fields are variables, which will be later filled with values during runtime by your application. When saving a document (= layout) with dycodoc to disk, there is also a binary coded template written with the same file name but a .TPL suffix. For your protection, a template is not editable by dycodoc.

This template is loaded later into the engine. The engine has a set of powerful methods and properties to query and modify the objects in a template, and for querying each field used in a template.

Another group of functions allows the setting of values for fields and controlling the document creation - from a page-level down to the level of single objects everything can be controlled.

Like with the other editions of VPE, the Enterprise Edition is database independent. However, dycodoc is shipped with the FieldStudio: an external application for editing available data sources and fields - which are provided by your application. It is intended, that your end-users don't use FieldStudio. Using FieldStudio, you can define different datasets, called data sources (which could be understood as tables from a database) with any number of fields and descriptions plus test-values for each field. In dycodoc you may bind multiple data sources to specific documents, so that your end-users have a predefined list of available data sources and fields for creating documents.

FieldStudio Screen Shot :

 

The files generated by FieldStudio are plain ASCII text, which gives you the ability of generating or updating such files on your own, depending for example on new releases of your software.

The following screen-shot shows the property dialog for a text object. This dialog pops up, if the user double-clicks onto an object. Note the button "Insert field" at the bottom of the dialog. A field is inserted at the current caret positon in the editor. In the example below, "$(Recipient:Title)" is such an inserted field. RTF Text, Barcodes, Images and UDO's may also contain fields!

Note, that dycodoc allows the mixed use of multiple fields and text within one object! dycodoc is not limited - like most other report and form editors - of having one field or pure text only within one object.

 

The next screen-shot shows the dialog, that pops up if the "Insert Field" Button is pressed. You (or your end-users) may select a data source - which was created with the FieldStudio before - and get a list of available fields you may chose from.

 

Instead of using the above dialog, you can also work with the Field Definitions Treeview, which allows to insert fields into text objects by Drag & Drop:

The following screen shot of the VPE preview shows how the filled out template will look like :