Bill Meyer

I have a love/hate relationship with ReportBuilder. My experience has been that it builds PDFs reliably, and with no quality concerns. That said, when you encounter idiosyncratic behaviors, finding solutions for them can be a nightmare. It is on my agenda to try FastReports, which looks promising.

The only time I have seen issues with image quality was when the provided image was significantly smaller than needed, and it was being stretched the the desired size. That said, I believe that the support for such operations in most graphics components is less than excellent. If you need to enlarge images, you may do well to use graphics32 or similar, to enlarge them before inserting to the report.

The charts I have needed to insert were relatively small, such that three -- the maximum I needed -- would fit on one page. Since there is embedded support in ReportBuilder for TeeChart, I wonder whether that may handle the concerns you raised.

I do this in ReportBuilder. Are you using a reporting tool of any sort?

But the formatter is of little use, if it can be confused by coding style. There are many things I don't do that others have done, and in some cases, I will use a formatter to clean things up, but most of the time, I am dealing with old code in source control, and my colleagues would be very unhappy to see files reformatted. 😉

A dictionary is nice, but in older versions -- I work a lot in D2007 -- then I make use of enums and const arrays. Defining them can be tedious, but maintenance is simple, and associated code is clean and easy. One thing to note on defining const arrays in the private section of a class: In D2007, I have found that defining consts in the class breaks the Ctrl-Shift-Up/Dn navigation between interface and implementation on members below the const declaration. I therefore put const declarations in the implementation section of the unit.

That is something the Delphi Unit Dependency scanner will report. https://github.com/norgepaul/DUDS

Just a small thing, but in the Dependency Analyzer window, the first panel in the status bar could be made somewhat wider. It is truncating the string slightly in my project where there are over 2800 units.

What sort of standards? That word is almost as useless on Google. 😉 But I can imagine all sorts of things I would seek to make standard within an application....

Quite a few years ago, someone wrote a series of articles on how to design forms that were testable in code. I thought it was also a great demo of why you should avoid doing so, as the added complexity was impressive. At any event, I thought I knoew who the author was, and in what magazine they were published, but I seem to have been wrong. A great deal of time on google didn't help. If anyone here recalls the articles, the magazine, or the author. please let me know. Bill

These were recommended to me: http://www.freeclipboardviewer.com/ https://nirsoft.net/utils/inside_clipboard.html MS Word, copying to the clipboard, inserts all manner of stuff. The export from GExperts was 3K; from MS Word, 44K. And I have no idea which particular chunk of content may make the difference. 😞 For now, I can export as RTF, paste into an editor and save, then import that to Affinity Publisher.I just discovered that ClipMate, which I have used for years, offers an Application Profile report which suggests in its section on Publisher that the current possibilities are only TEXT and RTF. However, the RTF fragment from GExperts pastes as plain text. If I save it in Notepad, and then Edit, Place (Import) in Publisher, it comes in with formatting, as it should. I am collecting datapoints, but I can't claim to have gained any useful insight.

I routinely use Source Export to capture snippets I then insert into MS Word as formatted text. Right now, I am attempting to do the same with Affinity Publisher as the target, but the text after paste is plain, not formatted. If I paste to MS Word, then copy the same block from MS Word and paste to Affinity Publisher, I get the desired result. But obviously, at the expense of more steps in the workflow. Is there some tool I can use to look at the raw content from the clipboard item, so I can get some idea how the Source Export differs from what I copy from MS Word?

That aspect you should be able to resolve easily enough with a TStringList as a buffer, and just iterate through the source stringlist from bottom to top, copying lines to the destination.

For reasons I have never understood, the TDataset and its descendants stream data, but not properties. In my own work, I have had to deal with this in connection with the field properties we wish to pass to reporting code. It is all very nice to have Alignment, DisplayFormat, and DisplayLabel, but rather annoying that there is no option to include them in streaming.

Not yet.....