[Lazarus] fpReport released

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Mon, 21 Aug 2017, Ondrej Pokorny via Lazarus wrote:

> On 21.08.2017 1:38, Graeme Geldenhuys via Lazarus wrote:
>> On 2017-08-20 21:16, Andreas Frieß via Lazarus wrote:
>>> The freetype dll searched by the fpreport was freetype-6.dll, but the
>>> actual freetype-2.3.5-1-bin.zip has only a freetype6.dll. (Renaming is
>>> not a problem for me)
>>
>> It seems FreeType has some inconsistencies with its releases and 
>> naming of the DLL. I have copies of freetype-6.dll, freetype6.dll and 
>> freetype.dll - all version 6 and all downloaded from somewhere on the 
>> Internet.
>>
>> I guess the one good thing is that there is a fpReport TODO item to 
>> remove the freetype*.dll dependencies for Windows in the future. That 
>> is already possible with the AggPas exporter, but in that specific 
>> case I prefer the freetype usage as it generates better text via 
>> AggPas and has more features that the Windows Font API supports.
>
> I use my own reporting engine - very similar to fpReport (no GUI 
> dependency, no DB dependency, XML-template based). I use fpTTF for 
> getting font information for rendering. Can't you use it as well?

It is already used.

>
> For LCL bitmap output (preview), I use EasyLazFreeType / 
> TIntfFreeTypeDrawer directly to get a TLazIntfImage. No need for AggPas 
> or other libraries.

Only if you use the LCL.

>
> What do you need freetype for?

If you use the HTML or PDF rendering, you don't need it. 
If you want fpImage rendering, it is needed to actually render text. 
I'm working on having this dependency on freetype removed.

Michael.