Our long-term plan is for Rep Plus to be beome an open-source application supported by members of its user community. In the shorter term we are making available functional modules of Rep Plus that may be of value to other software developers who use the Xojo compiler and framework.
Formatted Text Control
We recently purchased the full rights in the document processor, Formatted Text Control (FTC), from the company that used to sell it as source code that could be embedded in applications distributed in compiled form.
FTC provides the functionality of a word processor that supports styled text, embedded images, style definitions, layout, pagination, printing and export to RTF.
It was the only proprietary code in Rep Plus and we could not move to open source unless we owned the product itself. Since there are many other users, we are making this code freely available and facilitating the formation of a user community to maintain and enhance it.
We are making the source available through this web page, starting with the original commercial release, and then, possibly, our enhancements to it, including demos such as our RepDoc editor which includes a tab ruler, and styling and styles definition editors.
FTC V3.2.1 Open Sourced under MIT License on GitHub
On request, I have been issuing Bob Keeney's last version of FTC, 3.2.1, with the license replaced with an MIT open source one, essentially use as you wish at your own risk.
Michael Taylor has now kindly mounted this code on GitHub, and we hope that site will become the focus of an open-source community maintaining and enhancing FTC over time.
RepDoc Manual and Demonstration Available
My own version of FTC has gradually diverged from the commercial version over the years as I use it primarily for the output of analyses in textual form, and needed a full set of of tabs, a soft return, and the capability to set attractively styled tables. It is currently fairly tightly integrated with my other code but, if there is sufficient interest, I would be happy to extract it and make it freely available as a fork of FTC.
Its capabilities are fairly well documented in the RepDoc manual which is available on the Documents page of this site, and a working version of RepDoc is part of the Rep Plus app which is available through the Downloads page.
My strategy was to enhance FTC as much as possible through subclasses and change its code as little as possible, so RepDoc should be able to read FTC documents from other apps that have been saved in XML, and may still be a dropin replacement for FTC. It would be useful to have feedback from anyone who tests that.