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Intel corner
Printing Rotated Text
Using declares to draw a rotated string on Windows.
Issue: 3.6 (July/August 2005)
Author: Christian Schmitz
Author Bio: Christian Schmitz is the creator of the Monkeybread Software REALbasic Plugins.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 7,916
Starting Page Number: 42
RBD Number: 3620
Resource File(s):
3620.sit Updated: Monday, July 25, 2005 at 11:27 AM
Related Link(s): None
Known Limitations: None
Excerpt of article text...
Recently a REALbasic user asked in the REALbasic newsgroup (comp.lang.basic.realbasic) about how to get the Windows device handle of a graphics object. He needed to talk directly to the Windows API to do some special things like printing rotated text. This article will show how to do this.
How to get the handle
The first difficulty is getting the actual handle. In C, an HDC is a handle for the device context. In REALbasic we can use a simple integer for this. To get it, you currently need a plugin. The MBS Plugins include a "graphics.HandleMBS as integer" function which can be used without registering the plugin collection. Depending on reader feedback we may also offer a special REALbasic Developer plugin for this function in the future.
The HandleMBS function can be used like this in REALbasic:
dim g As Graphics
g = OpenPrinterDialog
if g <> nil then
msgbox hex(g.handleMBS) // Show handle as hex number
end if
What we need for the declares
We declare some functions from the Windows GDI API. First is CreateFontIndirectA, which loads a font object to memory. This is the ANSI function, which is not Unicode-savvy, but always present. The newer Unicode version, CreateFontIndirectW, is not installed with Windows 98. You can of course change the example to support Unicode. This function needs a pointer to a LOGFONTA data structure which is displayed in a comment inside the code below. This structure contains various parameters for the font needed and we will use them later. The returned value is a handle for the new font object.
...End of Excerpt. Please purchase the magazine to read the full article.
Article copyrighted by REALbasic Developer magazine. All rights reserved.
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