There are about four implementations I can think of that are capable of loading SVG graphics into a Delphi application.
One of those, by Mattias Andersson, who is the author of FMX.Canvas.VPR
, works with FireMonkey, but he's not yet prepared to release the code.
A second one, by Martin Walter, works with the VCL, but developer has quit Delphi and has no plans to convert to FireMonkey.
A third one, part of the AGGPAS framework, works with the VCL, but no FireMonkey.
A fourth one is in development by Jason Southwell, but no date has been fixed yet.
So my question: what road to take if I want an SVG component today, without trying to reinvent the wheel a fifth (and probably more) time?
I'm Mattias Andersson -- the author of FMX.Canvas.VPR; I can say that I'm still actively working on the SVG solution. I guess once I have properly added support for gradients and text rendering then I can release a first beta version. I'm relying on TXMLDocument and that is a bit restrictive in what you are permitted to do (IMO), so I've had to invent some workarounds (maybe a better option would have been to implement my own XML class from scratch.) Also, I've had to do some run-time patching of the FireMonkey classes in order to make everything work correctly. The good part is that I'm actually implementing things according to the SVG interface specifications.
The SVG component I've been working on has been released as part of our Apesuite for Firemonkey.
http://arcana.sivv.com/apesuite
Getting involved with Mattias Andersson in the development is the best option:
FMX.Canvas.VPR by Mattias Andersson looks promising and VPR is proven to be an excellent project
No spoon-fed SVG FireMonkey component working out-of-the-box is available as of the time of posting (extensive web search made in general).
You could also consider using Chromiumembedded. Just load the svg in the embedded browser. You can then mix Delphi code with javascript, mix in html and css, etc.
This way, you can just leave it up to Chrome how to draw stuff fast (for example whether to employ gpu acceleration or not).
You'll get proper svg support, it's easy to integrate into your application, it's flexible, and there is lots of documentation and example code available online.
Related
I want to make a charting control for an embedded device using Silverlight for Windows Embedded. Currently i am planning to use line shape for drawing the graph.
My question is if its a good approach(performance wise) or should i look for other options.
Or if any controls are available for SWE.
Thanks
Silverlight is not a proper answer to drawing charts on an Windows Embedded Compact device. You should go for using (or creating) a native GDI element. If performance is very important (e.g. for a fast-updating chart), you might also consider DirectDraw.
The best way in a commercial project would probably be to use a readymade component, such as this one.
You can find somebody else's experiences and advice here for pointers to what to look for when doing this yourself. If you expand your post with more details about what you are actually trying to achieve, I might give you a more detailed response.
The answer is stop using Silverlight, since Microsoft is abandoning the product. Do it in Flash—or better yet, use HTML5 and JavaScript.
In recent windows embedded applications that use windows universal apps I would highly recommend oxyplot.
http://oxyplot.org/
These plots are the best I've found on the internet so far and very easy to use. Best of all they are free. You can get these using a NuGet Package manager which makes getting updates fairly simple.
I was looking into creating iOS-apps (especially for the iPad) with the Adobe-Flex framework. It looks very promising to code apps this way.
Is it possible to create own controls/widgets? In the far future I might want to create my own kind of gantt-calender or whatever. Is something like this possible and are there any good tutorials/book out there?
Thanks in advance!
UPDATE: I want to create iOS Components that I can use in Flex. Controls, that are not aviable by default in Flex. Is that possible? By derivating or something?
UPDATE 2: In the meanwhile I found FlexLib to be useful. How hard is it to create stuff like this on your own? Especially for mobile devices. Are there any good tutorials, books, etc. out there?
Yes, you can create your own Controls in Flex. They are commonly called Components. I suggest you start by reading the Flex Docs on how to do so. There are also plenty of other resources out there. One is a screencast series that I created for The Flex Show. Here is episode 1.
You had asked:
How hard is it to create stuff like this on your own?
It depends on what the component wants to do. The commercial components we've built at www.flextras.com have taken from three to twelve months to build. Our Calendar is built from scratch, but most of the other components extend existing Flex Framework components.
The Flextras stuff are architected for reuse. A "single use" component for a specific app can be built in 1 hour [and up].
Once again, the purpose of a component will affect how long it takes to build.
#chiffre
Ok, maybe I am guessing wrong but "iOS controls" makes me think not to "flex controls".
Anyway with Flex 4.5.1 you can add any controls you want, the only thing that you must count (and this counts a lot) is performance.
Read especially about item renderers since scrolling list is not so fast on iOS and how you can make use of cacheAsBitmap.
Also keep in mind to always use light controls when needed if not extend base controls like UIComponent or Sprite and not Button if you just need a rectangle.
Here are some links
http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2011/06/adobe-air-2-7-now-available-ios-apps-4x-faster.html
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/mobile-development-flex-flashbuilder.
Does it happen that no one ever needs histogram in Delphi ?
Google gave me a bunch of half-baked code snippets. But it means that each time you need one - you have to invent one more ad hoc bycicle.
Torry mostly told me about some very expensive closed source Math Statistics or Financial packages, that as a subproduct have histograms. But they are very expensive and since you have no source code, each time you install update onto IDE/RTL/VCL you're probably screwed, until the vendor would make (soon ? ever?) updated packages. Given thatvendor is still does exists.
S.O. told me nothing, nil.
For what i found...
Mitov.com provides some histograms in PlotLab. which told to be free for non-commercial. Alas, it is again closed-source, and if the Histogram - quite fancy let's admit -is the onlything i need from it - why pay the whole price ?
One more example http://DSpatial.sf.net
Just few years ago i used it in Delphi 5, but even then i felt the author is loosing interest in the project. I made few enhancement, fixed some bugs, he merged them and that's all. The component was not very useful and lacked upon features, yet better than nothing. Now the project seems to be completely dead. Good old days, etc. But i do not want them back :-)
And Stack Overflow seemingly carries no single question about it. But maybe just no one bothered to create topic, after search found nothing ? I mean, Delphi was created for database access, histograms are one of basic ways to visualize data, and no one crosses them ? Something with nice style, with rich mouse tooltip like in HTML/CSS/JS on http://www.moskva.fm/stations/FM_95.2 ?
Or is this too domain-related and not ever possible to have good abstraction ?
TChart is a control that ships with most versions of Delphi. TChart can be used to make histograms (bar charts) in style. The following give you some ideas about how to use it: http://www.digitalcoding.com/tutorials/delphi/Simple-steps-to-create-Delphi-chart.html and http://delphi.about.com/od/adptips2006/qt/chart_selectbar.htm .
If you need something with code, google the pages at delphiforfun.org/programs/oscilloscope.htm . These are not controls. The oscilloscope article has a histogram with source. Some of the other projects at the site have other histogram graphs with source..not elegant but useful and free. Use them as a template to make your own control.
The link at http://delphiforfun.org/programs/Math_Topics/probability_distributions.htm shows how to make your own statistics displays with "histograms." This example makes use of TChart.
Here is some more stuff to try I found looking at my resource file:
http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/TAChart, http://members.home.nl/mvanwesten/en_lazarus.html , http://www.martinole.org/TAChart.html ...some of these are GPU components that supposedly work with some versions of Delphi. Perhaps this is your lucky day as there is some source code. The first and third listed probably will work reasonably for histograms. You may have to write your own statistics algorithms.
Found this thread while doing some searching. The ImageEn component suite has a THistogramBox component. It's the NOT prettiest thing in the world, but it's the only one I've found so far.
http://www.imageen.com
I came across a histogram example in a gdiplus package available for download from code central. I don't know if it will do what you need but when I saw it I remembered your SO question.
HTH.
If you were using firemonkey, you could just created a series of TRectangles in series. They can be made unclickable by turning hittest off. Or is that too easy and straightforward?
What's the best way to draw shapes interactively at run time using Delphi? I need to be able to select, drag and resize the shapes. This will be used to mark up existing images and documents.
This looks like a good starting point, but I'm wondering if there's a more complete library (preferably free) available that will save some time.
Update:
If you're going with a custom solution from scratch, I've seen another example on Delphi Central that might be an even better starting point.
I will recommend you, read some links on my site. Are explained and all the source code is available; You can see and get some usefull for you.
Plugin system in Delphi - Part 2
Not directly what you need, is a plugin system for Delphi. But all the samples are based on a drawing tool that uses Shapes (Creating, selecting, resizing). You can review the code and extract what you need.
Sample manipulating of "Maps and Figures"
Sample of how to create, select and move components at runtime (in this case with TImage).
- Select shapes visually: Shows different ways to select shapes visually.
The web is in Spanish, but you can generate an authomatic translation on the web itself.
Anyway the code is commented.
Regards.
Excuse-me for my bad english.
One freeware option would be TssControlSizer. Just change the "control" property to the control you want to manipulate resize/move.
Not sure if you've moved on now with this Bruce but if you haven't, it might be worth looking at TMS Components Diagram Studio - it's certainly cheap, and looks quite powerful from the demo.
I would use Flex Graphics (commercial, $499 for one developer, with sources, $1500 for site-license, with source code). When I bought it, it was a lot less than that. So I guess, I wouldn't pay that now. It's a lightweight 'drawing/cad' package.
But as I already own it, I could import a page from the original document as an image, perhaps rendered in PNG or WMF, and then mark it up with lines, etc.
You could think of it as a light "cad" package. It has most primitive shapes, and you can easily create your own new objects or shapes in Delphi classes, that could be "smart shapes" like the ones in Visio.
http://www.flex-graphics.com/
Another commercial component set that I have heard only good things about is TRichView. They have a TRichViewEdit that looks like you could emulate a document markup environment easily with it.
Please check here:
TCAD -2d graphics component for delphi
http://www.codeidea.com
wish can help you.
I need to add printing capabilities to an app and I have been looking around for information about printing. Logical/physical sizes, dpi, font scaling, etc, lots to digest since I never programmed printing into any app before.
Are there any sites that would offer a primer on the topics of page sizes, margins and all the other elements required to understand printing on Windows? I've been looking around for a while but what I find is either cryptic or years old...
I've been playing around with TPrinter, but I would like to build solid printing functionalities and understand what I'm doing better.
Using a report solution is not an option, even though I'm sure it would provide better results much sooner.
Two links to get you started:
Printing with TPrinter
Printing via the TPrinter Canvas
I think that you are looking too lowlevel.
Try looking at the build reporting tools (Rave or whatever is in your product).
Personally i am using a product called Report Builder from Digital Metaphors.
But if you want to do the lowlevel stuff lot og good information can be found at efg's computer lab - printing
Well, I have done things a variety of ways in the past, including the "hard way" with TPrinter. In fact, I recently had to do that again to run a special inventory label printer.
On the other hand, sometimes you are better off taking work others have done and using it for your benefit. I agree that ReportSmith isn't so great, and also it's Delphi (and Windows) specific. Using Excel or Word has those limitations, plus the fact that the user has to actually have them installed.
One thing I have done to make printing easy for some simple applications is just to generate an HTML file and call the user's web browser, then they can print it. HTML tables can be created relatively easily for numerical data, and you can include photos, etc. as well. This works well for some applications, and works on every platform where a web browser is installed. The downside, of course, is that HTML isn't the most precise layout language.
The version of Delphi you´re using is important. A number of Delphis came with print engines like ReportSmith (ugh). Another option thinking laterally is to use MS Word as a print engine. I´ve hooked into instances of Word & Excel before & utilised their functionality. As to raw printing using TPrinter or the print method of TForm you´d have to be pretty desperate. I seem to recall the Pacheo / Texeira Delphi books coming with a pretty good overview so you might want to see if you can find a copy of that somewhere.