Phew, thanks! I thought it was a computer term and I would have to learn what it meant.

Much happier now.

Hello Tom,

Re: "Suppose however what is printed overlaps so that the printouts are unreadable. I have this problem with Placidus. The program produces enormous amounts of information but the printout is largely illegible."

Perhaps you should use Paint Shop Pro or Designer Pro 6 or somesuch and just capture the screen when it looks the way you want it. Then, just print the screen capture. In this case, what you see IS what you get...

Or you can rearrange items to suit you... (example below)

Hope this helps!

Peace

Atlantean

Hello Tom,

Re: Hi Curtis...love the graphics...

Since Curtis didn't post any graphics, I will assume you meant me (James/Atlantean).

If so, thanks...

Peace

Atlantean

Tom wrote:

Usually when text is unrecognizable it means that their custom font was not installed properly.

OK Curtis now you've stepped in it. You've demonstrated a good deal of knowledge about what goes on under the hood of an astrology program and you will pay.

Have you an answer for this one as well? I'm assuming this discussion centered around a screen display, but not all astrology programs are WYSIWYG (In my opinion this is a great strength of Solar Fire to be able to pull up what will print out, tables and all, in order to avoid continuously having to print out each and every chart).

Hate to do this to you, because it is unlikely that you are familiar with every astrology program out there, but I did it anyway.

Tom

You should throw something harder than this because this is a lightweight question.

Delphic Oracle is WYSIWYG as well. In fact I was a Solar Fire user for 8 years before I developed Delphic Oracle and asked Esotech (and many other software companies) to include many of the ancient techniques we were finding back in the mid 90's from Project Hindsight but most wouldn't do it at the time because "there wasn't a market". Being frustrated by this I decided I had to do it for myself. But once my software got out there in the late 90's then all of a sudden it seemed like others all over the place were trying to copy what I was doing in the traditional area. Almost all of the major software companies in the field have tried to hire me since.

Rumen's knowledge of astrology, mathematics and languages is impressive, but his programming skills need work. My problem is the reverse and while I have extremely advanced skills in programming and math, my knowledge of astrology is not as advanced as it could have been because of it (which is why I have relied on Robert Schmidt's instructions so much). I have seen Placidus from his PDF a couple of years ago, but haven't seen it in action. I don't know for sure what IDE he is using but many in the field of astrology seem to be using Delphi (usually a somewhat antiquated version of it to avoid the migration issue). I have created about 45 custom components for the Delphi XE IDE (also compatible with most versions back to version 7) itself that extend the range of the graphical user interface by inheriting class structures and extending their functions. I've also studied Hank Friedman's site so I know what is going on out there.

If you will notice that the Placidus screen is almost all white and he is using very few advanced controls (such as the docking controls which would be seen in a program such as Dreamweaver (for designing web pages) which is what I've based my GUI on) but instead using radio buttons, checkboxes and such (which are all on the standard tab of the Delphi IDE). He is doing almost all of his screen graphics using the windows GDI (probably encapsulated within the the IDE he's using). GDI = windows Graphics Device Interface. There are about 8 different functions that he's probably using such as Arc(), Ellipse(), MoveTo(), LineTo(), etc which are all functions of the TCanvas object and of course he has to scale this to the users screen which will be different on different machines. When drawing on the screen like this you are using pixels. This is the foundation of the problem. When printing, the resolution of the printer has to be matched or scaled to the display. Some IDE's give the screen resolution (it's part of the windows API if not) using the Screen Object, such as Screen.Height, Screen.Width. The Printer Object in Delphi will give these resolutions as well, but usually use a higher DPI (Dots Per Inch) or the printout would look horrible (grainy). If the programmer forgets to scale to the printer then you can have overlap, or extremely small print etc... because dots on the screen are usually magnified compared to the printer (a printer is typically 300 DPI, but a monitor will usually be between 70 - 90 DPI. There are aftermarket solutions that handle scaling like this and I use Rave Reporting to position screen objects (which is similar to the reporting tool that Solar Fire uses to create custom reports).

To draw on a screen like this he's probably using a TImage, TMetaCanvas or TPaintbox class variant, each has their advantages and disadvantages. I use TImage because it is persistent (means that you don't need to rely on Invalidate method), and drawing off screen eliminates flicker. I suggested this approach to Ray White a while back to fix the flicker problem in Nova Chartwheels. Sometimes when animation takes place programmers forget to hide their drawing code in an invisible TImage object. Instead one should do this:

draw on invisible image (instead)... then:
VisibleImage.Picture.Graphic := InvisibleImage.Picture.Graphic;

Because of this my chart animations are smooth and the GUI is contained: