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Category: Cross-Platform

Xojo’s PDFDocument Class, Beyond the Standard 14 and More

One of the trickier things when dealing with PDF document creation is typography. By default, the PDF typography handling in Xojo’s PDFDocument class includes the “standard 14“, 14 typefaces you can use freely without requiring them to be included as part of the document itself. This guarantees a very important thing: any user can open and view that PDF document as it was created, without the text suffering from typography substitution, style lost, variations in kerning and tracking, etc. The standard 14 include Times, Courier, Helvetica, Symbol and Zapf Dingbats.

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Converting Web Projects to Web Framework 2.0

With the release of Xojo 2020r1 comes the new 2.0 version of our web framework. While the way in which you build web applications hasn’t fundamentally changed, this new version is a from-the-ground-up rewrite and utilizes API 2.0 for greatly improved consistency. This means that the conversion process is going to be time-consuming, but will be well worth the effort as web applications built upon Web Framework 2.0 will be more robust, handle more users, be more responsive and have a far more modern look and feel.

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PDF Arrives at Xojo!

Xojo 2020r1 brings a highly requested feature to the Xojo IDE: the ability to create PDF documents from code! Now you can use the already familiar methods in Xojo’s Graphics class to create Standard PDF 1.4 documents with the PDFDocument class.

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Top-Rounded Rectangle

On the forum a user asked if there was a way to create a rectangle with only the top left and top right corners being rounded. Xojo’s built-in RoundRectangle control draws with all four corners rounded, so that was not an option.

One solution is to use a GraphicsPath to draw exactly what you want. With a GraphicsPath you can use the AddArc() method to add rounded corners and then draw the lines for the rest of the rectangle.

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Code Tip: How to Implement the ARC4 Encryption Algorithm

ARC4 is a symmetric encryption algorithm fast and easy to implement. Being symmetric does means that it uses the same function with the same key (varying from 40 to 2048 bits) both for cyphering and de-cyphering a block of data.

Is it the most secure or robust encryption algorithm around? Not really. But it provides a good amount of performance and you can take further steps in order to correct some of its flaws. So, continue reading if you are interested in having this one in your developer toolset implemented as a Class with separate methods to encrypt and decrypt a block of information (even if it uses the same function in both cases).

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Quick Tip: Centering a Picture on any Graphic Context

Sure you can create a Subclass of any Picture, Canvas or class and write code to center another Picture in its respective Graphics contexts. But taking the class extension approach means that you can reuse the same code for any of these (or any additional class) offering a Graphic context, so you can pass along the Picture you want to center and re-scale (if needed) in its area.

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Tip: LinkLabel on Desktop

The Xojo Web Framework offers the WebLink class ready to use which handles showing the text with the proper visuals and the opening of the underlying URL in the browser. But if you need to have that feature on Desktop, it’s not that hard! Continue reading so I can show you one possible implementations to create your own LinkLabel class on Desktop.

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