What does it look like?

Three equivalent APIs

ALL In-The-Box is available in 3 different editions, each of them corresponding to a specific programming interface:

• ALL In-The-Box ActiveX: to be used with Visual Basic, Visual C++, and all development tools supporting the ActiveX standard.

• ALL In-The-Box for Delphi: offers a VCL programming interface, supporting the following Delphi versions: 5, 6, 7, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2009 (in Win 32 mode). Using Delphi 2009, you can choose to encode PDF documents either in ANSI or in Unicode.

• ALL In-The-Box DLL: based on a plain dynamic link library (not an ActiveX library). Can be used with all Win32 development tools.

How to generate a document?

Using the ActiveX or Delphi editions, the whole programming interface is supplied in a unique, non visual, component, to be placed on a form of your application. Using the DLL edition is hardly more complicated. Internal objects are identified by handles.

In all cases, the principle of document generation is this:

1. Select an output channel (display, printer, PDF, TIFF archive or image collection) by assigning the Channel property.

2. Indicate an appropriate destination: depending on the output channel, it may be a control of your application, a printer name or a file name.

3. Start the document by calling the BeginDoc method.

4. Build up the document contents by drawing graphics and putting visual objects on the paper sheet.

5. Complete the document by calling the EndDoc method.

The Document Viewer

ALL In-The-Box contains a Document Viewer giving developers full programmatic control over display, print and export features.

The viewer can be embedded in any window of your own application. Its customizable toolbar offers all classical navigation and tuning commands. The programming interface lets you modify toolbar aspect, remove tools, add new tools and take control over predefined actions. Alternatively, you can implement your own tool bar instead of the standard toolbar, so as to maintain aspect consistency of your software.

The Document Viewer supports interactive features such as bookmarks, hyperlinks, notes, attachments, mediclips. The event-oriented programming interface lets you take control over user's actions.

Captions and titles are displayed in English by default, but you can dynamically have them translated to another language. Translations are provided for French, Spanish and German. You can add new languages by yourself.

Once the document is displayed, you can output it to other channels: printer, PDF, TIFF archive, image collection.

Basic Example Programming Language: Visual Basic With AllBox1     .Channel = chDisplay     .DisplayHostHandle = MyControl.hwnd     .BeginDoc     .Put "Hello world !", 200, 300     .EndDoc End With Basic Example with AllBox1 do begin     Channel := chDisplay;     DisplayHost := MyControl;     BeginDoc;     Canvas.Put ('Hello, world!', 200, 300);     EndDoc; end; Basic Example Programming Language: Visual Basic Dim hAllBox As Long   hAllBox = CreateBox(0, 0)   SetNumProp hBox, Box_Channel, chDisplay SetNumProp hBox, Box_DisplayHostHandle, MyControl.hwnd BeginDoc hAllBox Put hAllBox, "Hello world !", 200, 300   EndDoc hAllBox FreeBox hAllBox

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Below is the document generated by this example:

Naturally, ALL In-The-Box can do much more! The programming interface contains about 400 symbols (classes, methods, properties and events).