PureBasic Forums - English

Good Afternoon,

I am casting around for a good commercial grade basic compiler. I'm a retired applications programmer (before windows 95) and am on a limited income. What I need to know is if the commercial grade will allow me to work a window for text editing changing font, characteristics, & color on the fly without buying additional software. I would hate to buy a compiler just to find out that it is a hassle to set up for good programming.

Thank you for your consideration.

Enjoy the day,
Earl

Not sure if I fully understand the question.

A window for text editing in your application or are you asking about the development platform?

The entire windows API is available via call so pretty much anything is possible.

When you get into 'custom' colorization you may want to do your own 'drawing' to accomplish some effect.

maybe you can explain a little better what it is you would like to do?

BTW - like you, I'm a retired former developer, circa DEC pdp's in the 70's. PureBasic is the best game in town - see my www url for an application done entirely in PureBasic, and there are many who have done much, much better than that. Welcome to the forums- I imagine you'll be joining us

cheers

(sorry to hear about the show being cancelled

What I need to know is if the commercial grade will allow me to work a window for text editing changing font, characteristics, & color on the fly without buying additional software.

I'm not shure if I understand you right, but you can use the editorGadget built into PureBasic to edit
text and do what you ask for without paying for additional code.

Check out the code in tips&tricks, announcements etc to see what (at least) PureBasic is capable of. I
doubt if it's possible to get more bang for your bucks elsewhere.

Good Morning,

Thank you for the responses. I'll try to be clearer.

I do not wish to create a word processing program, but my goal is to allow a person to open an editor, format a document, and the editor will print the document WYSIWYG, and create an elegant, hybrid DHTML document includng javascript routines, CSS, font changes, colorization, character size changes, character color changes, line shading, bullets, paragraph numbering, graphics inplant, and hyperlinks.

I have seen this done by MicroSoft Word - brute force inelegant code. I know it can be done better. I may not be the first to want to do it, but I'm looking forward to the challenge.

I have looked at FreeBasic, but to do what I want requires the programmer to add gtk, gmp, abc, def etc. That's not too bad, but when I get to the sites for downloads, there is beta, stable, and more add-ons like cairo, and this and that and the other - and very little documentation.
I can see why it is free: it is so much of a hassle to set up that a person would not want to buy it, and the hassle takes all the fun from using the system.

I looked at JustBasic and LibertyBasic, but making tokens and adding runtime libraries seems to be a trap - a sort of 'loss leader' leading towards a scam (that sometime in the future, the user may have to pay for the runtime coding). Plus does not seem to offer the options of PureBasic.

I'm not sorry for the rant. but I am frustrated. All I want is a good piece of software at an affordable price.

Enjoy the day,
Earl

Hi Earl! I'd like to tell you that i've tried all free/paid alternatives of all basic dialects i have found on the internet and none of them is like PureBasic. About the editor you are wishing to create, as long as you can call API functions and PureBasic is a compiler, you can create virtually anything. Why have thousands lines of code in your program when you can have all done with this simple syntax? No matter what others say, for me this is the BEST compiler and i know that in the future i won't change it for anything . I am not trying to make you buy it, you can allways download the demo version and take it to a ride. Try to search the forums, there are tons of code demos that prove that PureBasic is the leader.

Good luck with your choice!