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 ...

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...

Oh, it’s an eternal topic – creating an Excel spreadsheet from Delphi. Excel spreadsheets are one of the world’s standards today and for programs, even simple ones, it is frequently required to output the data as tables and transfer reports to the spreadsheet. One thing to notice i...

Not so long ago we have added support of Lazarus IDE for FastReport 4 VCL (starts from Pro version, because Lazarus updates recently and require source codes for recompilation). As it's still in the beta stage there is no any detailed instruction about its installation, yet. This basic article will...