TECH TIP: ReportBuilder’s RichText Architecture
The RichText in ReportBuilder is a wrapper around Delphi’s TRichEdit which in turn relies on Windows. There are two versions of Windows richedit – RichEd32.dll is the older one and RichEd20.dll is a newer one (RichEd32 is being phased out). Delphi by default relies on RichEd32 – the older version. To use some of the more advanced features of Windows RichEdit, see the topic on InfoPower RichEdit Support below.
In general Windows RichEdit supports the type of formatting that you can do using WordPad.
InfoPower RichEdit Support
InfoPower from Woll2Woll Software is a popular database add-on product for Delphi. InfoPower’s TwwRichEdit components support the Windows RichEdit2 format. This format allows the rich text data to contain embedded bitmaps and OLE objects. For more information please see http://www.Woll2Woll.com.
ReportBuilder includes a component that enables the TppRichText and TppDBRichText controls in ReportBuilder to use the formatting capabilities of InfoPower’s TwwRichEdit when rendering RTF data. The ppWWRichEd.pas unit located in the ..\RBuilder\InfoPower directory defines a TwwDBRichEdit descendant and then registers the class with ReportBuilder. This enables the TppRichText and TppDBRichText controls in ReportBuilder to use the formatting capabilities of TwwDBRichEidt when rendering data.
WPTools Support
WPTools is a collection of components used to edit and print formatted text. With its own RTF engine, WPTools offers numerous features not supported by the standard Windows RichEd20.dll. This control lets you use tables, paragraph frames, headers and footers etc. Using the optional ReportBuilder support units for WPTools 2.x, you can print the enhanced WPTools features (justified text, tables, graphics…) within your ReportBuilder reports. For more information please see http:\\www.wptools.de.
TRichView
TRichView is a suite of native Delphi components for displaying, editing, and printing hypertext documents. Documents can contain tables, pictures, and images. TRichView is available from www.trichview.com. There is a wrapper for available for using TRichView inside ReportBuilder, see: