Business Challenge

TextLine is advanced page layout software originally developed in 1994 for 16-bit Windows by a German company CCS Content Conversion Specialists GmbH, applied by many printing and publishing organizations in Germany and Switzerland. However, end-users experienced problems while running 16-bit version of TextLine on modern 32-bit platforms such as Windows 2000/XP.

Accordingly, the primary challenge for the customer was the re-engineering of the application in order to improve its stability and performance on modern platforms. Another objective was the development of additional features not available in 16-bit version, e.g. import of content in XML format etc.

Technology Evaluation

At project inception, Intellias performed analysis of the existing code, reviewed project architecture and evaluated the following approaches to re-engineering of the 16-bit application:

• Adoption of the existing 16-bit Object Pascal code and recompilation of the application using the 32-bit TMT Pascal compiler (http://www.freepascal.org)
• Leverage on 16-bit code of the core application modules when re-engineering application in Delphi in order to reduce the re-engineering effort
• Complete rewrite of the application on modern development platforms/technologies such as Delphi or .NET

Throughout the analysis of the former two approaches, Intellias performed profound review of one of the core application modules and created the estimate of effort required to adapt the module to be used as 32-bit code.

Following the detailed elaboration of each approach, Intellias decided to completely rewrite the application on Microsoft .NET platform in C#. Other approaches were turned down due to the following main reasons:

• Strong dependency of the existing code on 16-bit Borland Pascal libraries
• Insufficient separation between different modules of the application
• Low quality of code
• Extensive usage of 16-bit programming constructions
• Major effort required to adapt 16-bit code and enable its recompilation utilizing a 32-bit compiler

Another issue on agenda was the selection of the hyphenation technology to be applied. After thorough analysis the decision was made in favour of the best open-source alternative based on TeX hyphenation algorithm. Originally written in Java, it was designed to be ported as a separate module using .NET J#.

Project Functionality

• Advanced data repository management
• Workspace management (layers, zoom, master pages)
• Import of content in XML format
• Advanced text-formatting features (margin compensation, kerning, auto-hyphenation)
• Built-in macro language (commands for text formatting and layout, user-defined graphic objects and procedures)
• Advanced font management and customization (user-defined accent table, font size-dependent letter spacing, subscript, superscript)
• Pluggable hyphenation technologies
• Multilanguage support

The distinctive feature of the application is custom macro language. It encompasses more than 120 miscellaneous commands and supports two types of functions/procedures as well as various TextLine environment variables (e.g. "Actual fragment width", "Current font size", "Actual line spacing", "Distance to the nearest marker" etc) and 12 different units of measurement. Putting forward procedural style of programming and macros code reuse it enables advanced page layout scripting. Owing to the above mentioned functionality, the end-users obtain increased flexibility in elaborating and managing page layouts as compared to other similar software (e.g. Adobe Page Maker).

Project Architecture