Delphi Info

Borland has done an extremely poor job of marketing Delphi, one of their major mistakes (in my opinion at least) has been in not providing an inexpensive version of Delphi to be used as an entry level version.

Currently the IDE core of BDS is in the process of splitting off from Borland and will soon exist as an independent company. Once that transition has taken place I would expect that the new company will be much more likely to provide free or inexpensive entry level versions.

For now, your best bet is probably to just download the evaluation version. That is a time limited product, but perhaps by the time it expires there will be better options available. You may also find you really like some of the features of the professional version and find it to be worth purchasing.

Harry

Chicks,

I would recommend that you avoid trying to get started using Delphi 2005. I used Delphi 2005 and had very little trouble with it, but many people reported so many issues that I would be afraid it may give you a negative impression of Delphi.

Try to get Delphi 2006, if you can't get that, then either Delphi 6 or 7 would be preferable to 2005.

Harry

Thanks, I managed to find Delphi7 Personal on Borland's site in Poland, and have been tinkering for a few hours.

Already looks to be about 1000X more productive than PowerBASIC...

Sorry for not answering earlier, but my hard disk crashed Sunday and my spare time has gone into saving the savable and getting things up and running. If anybody has really earned an answer it is you (and Jim and a couple of others like our hosts).

I use C++Builder and not Delphi, but I know just enough Pascal to get by. Cpri (dag cpri!) has built a simple VCL component derived from TScrollBox which takes a PDF as input and displays it (using Borland native JPEG capabilities). To get this component you have to create it in a form, set necessary properties, and call methods.

Since I don't have Delphi I can't give you complete source code, but here is the basic recipe, which no doubt will have a couple of problems:

Create a project with a form.

Put a panel and a button on the form. Stick this declaration into the private section of the form.

PdfPage: TQuickPDFViewer;

In the form show event put.

  PdfPage.Create(panel); // this hosts the component inside the panel

In the button click event put:

  PdfPage.LoadFile := 'path to your PDF file';

  PdfPage.Show;

To be very neat, add PdfPage.Free in the form close event. Very basic, but I hope this helps you on your way.

Greetings,

 

Thanks for the info, Frans. I'll try it out next chance I get...