OCX Controls & software technologies

Precision Matrix Digital Display

Version 1.11

Overview

Purpose
	Precision Matrix Digital Display is a powerful OCX control for your applications which can be used to graphically represent a string composed of an arbitrary number of digits and other characters. There is a large predefined set of styles and color combinations among which you can choose. Digits are generated at runtime by enqueueing fixed-size bitmaps representing each one a digit. Thus this control is much faster and simpler to use that most of the available resizeable control.
Optimization
	Precision Matrix Digital Display was written entirely in C++ and is composed of strongly optimized code, the distributed OCX file only contains the essential code needed to perform the required features. There are no memory leaks, all the allocated memory and graphic resources are gracefully released. The only required libraries are the MFC and MSVCRT DLLs that are shipped with every version of Microsoft Windows. You do not need any additional libraries.
Speed
	Precision Matrix Digital Display is designed in such a way that all the drawing is performed in one single operation, thus rendering the double-buffering technique unnecessary. And without double buffering, the control redraws itself on the screen even faster!
Any special requirement ?
	If you are developing an application and found Precision Matrix Digital Display nearly perfect for you needs except for small details, please feel free to contact us: let's talk about it !
Documentation
	All the documentation you may need on Precision Matrix Digital Display is on line !

Trial version

Warning: the trial version has one major restriction with respect to the full version: it is not possible the change the text shown inside the control.
The full version works in the same way as far as a valid license number is specified: after that it is possible to fully exploit all the features.

Properties

BackColor
Domain: any color
Default value: depends on your development environment, usually 0x00C0C0C0 (grey),
Meaning: this is the color used to paint the unused space of the control bounding box.
DisplayedString
Domain: any string (no size limits !)
Default value: "0"
Meaning: this property simply represents the string you want the display to show. If the length of this string is not sufficient to make its graphical representation fill the control bounding box rectangle, the remaining space will be filled with BackColor; in this case, since the characters are fixed-size and you know in advance (at design-time) how many characters the control will at its maximum contain, we suggest you to pad with spaces: even empty spaces are well represented by this control.
It the string is too lengthy and its representation is longer than the control bounding box, the last characters could not be visible, and the last visible character could be truncated. To avoid this we suggest you to resize the control bounding box in order to have a width that is an exact multiply of the character width (20 pixels).
This is the full set of the 96 character you can use in DisplayedString: (the style used here is the #0).
Style
Domain: any integer number from 0 to 26
Default value: 0
Meaning: this value represent the style you choose, from this predefined series of bitmap sets:

# Example # Example # Example
0 9 18
1 10 19
2 11 20
3 12 21
4 13 22
5 14 23
6 15 24
7 16 25
8 17 26

Version History

Version 1.11
Fix the inversion between ';' and ':' charachters.

Version 1.1
Makes two distinct versions available, trial and full.

Version 1.0

Initial release.

Version 1.11
	Fix the inversion between ';' and ':' charachters.
Version 1.1
	Makes two distinct versions available, trial and full.
Version 1.0
	Initial release.