Draw Rotated Text

Current version of Lazarus provides the ability to draws text in an arbitrary rotation angle. Although is needed just to set the TFont.Orientation property to configure the feature, the position of the draw text will change according to the angle. So, to make things easier, i wrote a routine that draws a rotated text centered in a given Rect.

If someone needs something similar:

type
  TRotateType = (rtNone, rtCounterClockWise, rtClockWise, rtFlip);

procedure DrawRotateText(Canvas: TCanvas; const R: TRect; 
  const Text: String; RotateType: TRotateType);
var
  TextExtent: TSize;
  SavedOrientation: Integer;
begin
  SavedOrientation := Canvas.Font.Orientation;
  TextExtent := Canvas.TextExtent(Text);
  case RotateType of
    rtNone:
    begin
      Canvas.Font.Orientation := 0;
      Canvas.TextOut((R.Right - R.Left - TextExtent.cx) div 2,
        (R.Bottom - R.Left - TextExtent.cy) div 2, Text);
    end;
    rtCounterClockWise:
    begin
      Canvas.Font.Orientation := 900;
      Canvas.TextOut((R.Right - R.Left - TextExtent.cy) div 2,
        (R.Bottom - R.Left + TextExtent.cx) div 2, Text);
    end;
    rtFlip:
    begin
      Canvas.Font.Orientation := 1800;
      Canvas.TextOut((R.Right - R.Left + TextExtent.cx) div 2,
        (R.Bottom - R.Left + TextExtent.cy) div 2, Text);
    end;
    rtClockWise:
    begin
      Canvas.Font.Orientation := -900;
      Canvas.TextOut((R.Right - R.Left + TextExtent.cy) div 2,
        (R.Bottom - R.Left - TextExtent.cx) div 2, Text);
    end;
  end;
  Canvas.Font.Orientation := SavedOrientation;
end;

Finally...

... the VirtualTreeView port is released.

The release notes.

Convert database files from Ansi to UTF-8

While porting old Delphi projects that uses paradox files i faced the problem that the data was stored in an ANSI code page (the current Lazarus version expects UTF-8 encoded strings).

So i wrote an simple application that can convert the encoding of database files (sqlite3, dbf, paradox).

That program can be useful for more than legacy code: after converting a spreadsheet data to a sqlite3 file using Sqlite Data Wizard. The resulted file was in ANSI and there was no option (AFAIK) to convert directly to UTF-8.

I put it here in hope that can be used by someone else.