While developing your application you oftentimes are confronted with the task of letting your end-user enter formatted text or of creating documents such as reports, chain letters or invoices. Many products offer you the possibility of doing this. For the former task you could choose a control based on a RichEdit DLL, for the latter there is a large selection of report-generating tools. However, now there is finally a new tool which incorporates both functions in one product.

BASIC CONCEPT & HISTORY

　　WPTools , is a completely new product, based on the needs and wants of WPTools users over the past 8 years. The decision to re-write the source code from the ground up was made in order to create an improved architecture which allows the integration of new features, giving you yet unheard of functionality and versatility in a single component. As such Version 5 allows you to edit formatted text with all the attributes expected in a first-class word processing application. It supports a variety of different character and paragraph attributes, headers and footers, as well as tables, numbering and bullets. It also includes an interface to add spell checking components. Plus, it supports bookmarks and table of contents.

　　With the product wPDF export to PDF will work at once.You may say that this alone would not suffice to make WPTools better than the rest. Version 5 takes the lead as a result of the manner of implementation, the extended support of the standard word processing features and intuitive handling.

Feature Overview

• WYSIWYG WPTools 5 will always work in WYSIWYG mode, this means the printed output will always match the output you saw in the editor.
  
• Image Support WPTools supports embedded images - handles as characters or linked to paragraph or page.
  File Formats WPTools saves and loads text in ANSI, RTF, HTML/CSS and its own native "WPTools" format. But you can also add custom reader and writer classes.
• Headers and Footers Headers and footers can be loaded and saved in RTF or WPT format. They can be different for the first, the odd and the even pages.
  
• Different text attributes This component supports the paragraph and character attributes you are used to ... and a few more.

Tables

• Text styles (stylesheet) The core of WPTools has been optimized to work with styles - it was built from scratch using concepts also used by HTML/CSS
  
• Mailmerge and Forms Mailmerge is extremely powerful - also 'revers' mailmerge is possible ...
  
• Database Connectivity The WPTools editor can be easily used with databases. The mail merge can also load the field data from a database automatically.

Other features

Notes for upgraders from WPTools 4

　　Due to the changed data structures it is not possible to simply replace WPTools 4 with WPTools 5 although we are trying to make the upgrade as smooth as possible.

　　If you are working with mail merge fields, please make sure that the files WPTools 5 creates are not edited with a version of your application which is based on WPTools 4. WPTools 5 format to save mail merge fields is completely compatible to RTF standard, WPTools 4 format was a slight variation.

WPTools 5 does not (yet) support the following:

• Support for Quickreport
• Right to left writing (RTL support) (coming soon)
• Localisation of dialogs (coming soon)
• Support for WPForm
• PrintRect, Print_XYWH API (supported are "PrintPageOnCanvas" and "Draw")
• Selection of paper bins and duplex printing. (coming soon)
• WPTools 5 currently does not contain the "shared components". They will be added later.
• Many of the old 'StoreOptions' and 'LoadOptions' have become obsolete. A new concept will be introduced here later.

Conclusion

　　WPTools 5 was built to be the most powerful word processor available on the component market. In addition, it also works as a HTML editor, offering convenient word processing features, while still working as closely to the HTML document model as possible. The optional WPReporter makes it easy to create complicated documents from templates and data.