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Another store from the trenches: GDI vs PDF
2018-07-06 18:31
gdipdf
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One of the great things about Delphi is this object-oriented way of manipulating things called the Visual Component Library. There's much more to it than that, but in a sense you could describe it as a wrapper around Windows API's. One of these is GDI, it's old but it's still there and used for graphics and text-layout. It was born, way back when, from the idea of What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) taken even further and that the same program logic could work for display on screen and writing to a printer. Delphi's VCL declares the TCanvas class you can use to design the output, and wether you pass a Printer.Canvas, Screen.Canvas, Form.Canvas or Bitmap.Canvas shouldn't really matter. This works great for forms and reports.
But in the printing business, there's much more than forms and reports to put on paper. Over there the PDF reigns supreme. It performs a similar task, but originated out of a very different set of parameters. A big module we created of the production software at work generates them according to specifications. How this works is very different as the components that make up a PDF document are constructed one by one and this doesn't look like the work you normally would do with a TCanvas instance.
But now and again these two worlds need to bridge over to eachother. One day I had to keep automatic PDF archive copies of some reports, and discovered the great SynPDF project from the same people that created the mORMot framework. It offers a TCanvas instance (TPdfDocumentGDI.VCLCanvas) that you can pass to code that knows what to with a TCanvas reference. It works great.
I haven't needed to think about crossing the two the other way round, but recently I noticed a collegue did, and he also found a simple straight-forward solution for the problem: You can just ask the PDF reader on the system to render a PDF to a printer. It's as simple as starting a process with:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Acrobat Reader DC\Reader\AcroRd32.exe" /n /t "<document to print>" "<printer name>"
or
"C:\Program Files (x86)\SumatraPDF\SumatraPDF.exe" -print-to "<printer name>" "<document to print>"
This works just great and even doesn't add too much code to your program. You may need to include the PDF viewer installer with your installer, but that's a minor issue and perhaps not even required as most people have a PDF reader installed by default.
2018-07-06 21:29
whatsyourstyle
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→ Firefox and Chrome Pull Popular Browser Extension Stylish From Their Stores After Report Claimed It Logs and Shares Browsing History, Credentials — Slashdot
→ “Stylish” extension with 2M downloads banned for tracking every site visit — Ars Technica
Oh, what's this? Note to self: switch to Stylus, (also here and here)
StackOverFlow/Delphi: new blood?
2018-07-12 21:30
sodnewbies
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→ Stack Overflow — Newest 'delphi' questions
Am I seeing this correctly? I've been following this page somewhat less closely lately, but the majority of new questions is by people with not too high of a reputation score. And that's actually a good thing. Let me explain:
A while ago it looked like we were 'past StackOverflow peak'. StackOverflow started as an alternative to outperform all other question-and-answer sites for techies, by having a really well developed reputation system that allows a community to self-regulate. And it did. Both the reputation-system created a really fine repository of good questions and good answers, and all other question-and-answer websites were oblitherated (at least from the google top results on typical search-queries).
A few years later, StackOverflow appeared to struggle with having lost it's reason d'être: people with actual questions would easily mistake StackOverflow as a forum and saw most questions rapidly closed and reprimanded for not attaining an expected level of quality the community would hold to. This is a bad deal for newcomers and in general a source of bad feelings. They know about this over at StackOverflow. And have committed to take action. I haven't kept up to speed about what they're exactly plannig to do, but it could already be working.
Specifically for the questions tagged 'delphi', it's not only good that this way more people that just started collecting a reputation saldo, are posting valid questions and are getting helpful responses; I also think you can derive from it that more people are getting into Delphi. It's not up to me to tell whether that's in part because the most recent Delphi versions also successfully target mobile platforms, but if it's true I'm glad to know more people are about to experience the solidness of the Delphi eco-system, both in tooling and available components, and in solidity and reliability of your final result you're offering your users.
2018-07-17 23:53
timezones
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I feel stupid. I guess I've been put out of my comfort zone. I was thinking about doing something, and then I did, and I thought I'll just primarily make it work for me, but then I noticed "new" items were still two hours behind. Ofcourse that's due to the bias against UTC we have here in my current local timezone. So there you have it. All my programming career, I would just parse dates, and stop before this "+0200" or "-0900" thing that's there at the end. So the right thing to do is go all the way, and with a little effort make it work correctly for not just me, but for any user of this little thing.
But how? I remember these drop-downs with timezones where I typically look-up Brussels or Paris. But it's summer daylight-saving-time for the moment. So it switches to and from only one hour between UTC twice a year (until policy changes), how do I keep track of that? Is there something that I can have the system do this automatically for me? It feels like these are things I should have known all along, but dont. I guess I'll have to start reading somewhere...