Until recently, the task of generating reports through the Web from an application written in Lazarus was, let’s say, very creative. Today we are pleased to announce the release of client-server components for Lazarus in beta testing. They can be used to create and customise a server for remot...

What is a ZPL file? ZPL stands for Zebra Programming Language. It allows team to create the desired print design for any label or page. This makes the label independent from the specific printing device. The printer receives commands to produce shapes, frames, symbols and other things, and itsel...

A bit of theory about barcodes It is difficult to imagine our life without barcodes, especially now that we meet them at every step. We go to the cinema and our tickets contain this “black and white drawing of bars”, we go to the supermarket and each product has information about it in ...

CODE 39 is the barcode developed by Intermec Corporation in 1975. Up to 43 characters including numbers, letters and some symbols can be included in the barcode: 0123456789 ABCDEFG HIJKLMNOP QRSTUVWXYZ-.$/+%. Since letters can be handled, CODE 39 is indispensable in the industrial fields and used in...

I would like to note that FastReport VCL is one of the most convenient components for generating reports of any complexity. After all, here we can use not only different types of DBMS, but also Swiss barcodes, maps, tables, graphs and many other objects. Quite often we are asked “how to create...

ShapeFile, also known as Shape is a figure or a set of complex shape figures (probably, unrelated). A Shape field can be one of the following types of geometry: point, polyline or polygon. It is also notable that together with a *.shp file, *.dbf file is formed and it contains the header informatio...

BMP, JPEG, TIFF, GIF – there is a variety of raster image formats. 1. BMP First of all, you should know that since BMP is an old image format it is not so popular among Internet users, only the bitmap images are saved in this format which doesn’t support the vector ones. The size of ....

The SVG file is a two-dimensional vector image based on documents in XML format. The SVG format is used not only for the description of two-dimensional vector graphics, but also for mixed vector-raster images. Let's list the main advantages of SVG format: First of all, as previously mentioned ...

The ODT file extension is used for Open Document text files, which are usually created using the OpenOffice or LibreOffice word processor apps. This document format is based on the XML markup language and therefore easy to convert. To understand what kind of format it is, it’s enough to see t...

It is often necessary to combine several documents into one (for example, PDF). It could be several chapters of documentation, catalog directories etc. Strictly speaking, this sometimes needs to be done not only for PDF, it’s just that this file format itself does not imply editing and “...

Summary of ODS and ODF ODS is an open format for spreadsheets made in accordance with the OpenDocument Format (ODF) standard. This format is distributed free of charge and uses the standards of the International Organization for Standardization. The standard was developed by OASIS technical committ...

“How to save in the HTML file format from Delphi?”, “how to create an HTML 5 file from Delphi?”, “how to create the HTML 5 file from Lazarus?” – these questions often arise among the developers. The HTML document is written in Hypertext Markup Language (HTM...

Lately many countries have been digitizing payment processes. In other words, they convert existing payments to digital format. The most common way to automate payments is to use QR codes that are easily read by smartphones. The ability to encode a sufficiently large amount of information, high dama...

The TXT file stores text documents with information organized in the form of lines. In modern systems, strings are separated by line separators; in the past, storing strings in the form of records of constant or variable length was used. Sometimes the end of a text file (especially if the file size ...

Microsoft PowerPoint is a program for preparing and viewing presentations. It is a part of Microsoft Office and is available in editions for Microsoft Windows and macOS operating systems, as well as for Android and iOS mobile platforms.The program saves new presentations in * .pptx, * .ppt, * .ppsx ...

DOCX is an archive file that can be unpacked by a third-party program. This format is an upgraded version of the well-known DOC extension. A significant difference is a low file weight while maintaining all the original image parameters. If .doc is a binary text file, .docx contains XML files and ad...

CSV files (comma-separated values) are special types of files that you can create, read and edit in Excel. This format is textual and designed to provide tabular data. In CSV documents the data fields are separated by commas instead of columns (commas in English version or semicolons in Russian vers...

A frequent question is how to send a document from a Delphi application to RTF. It is a popular format and if you don’t have Microsoft Word installed on your computer you can use WordPad to open the file. This format is supported by Mac OS X’s default editor TextEdit. Most text editors s...

A developer has a huge choice of options when the task is to export to Excel from Delphi or Lazarus – it was partially described in the article “How to export a report to XLS Biff8 from Delphi” and there I also briefly explained why it is a bad choice. And what is a good choice, th...

Quite often, you need to get a PDF document from a Pascal application - either Delphi or Lazarus. Usually it is recommended to use specialized solutions, PDF converters (such as itext, Synopse PDF Engine, PowerPDF, HotPDF, PDF Creator Pilot, PDFtoolkit VCL, Debenu Quick PDF Library etc.). In this ar...