If this is your first contact with EMFexplorer, you should begin with the page for new users, which tells:

• what EMFexplorer does (EMF/WMF previewing, conversion, and printing);
• its licensing terms (free in most cases);
• what platforms it runs on (MS Windows);
• where to find some documents formatted for EMFexplorer (electronic books, images lists);
• and what to do if you need help.

The rest of this document is an overview of the project's architecture. It may be useful for both end-users and developers who are still interested after reading the documentation for new users.

Table of contents

• Project contents
• Types of EMFs
• Project architecture
• The ActiveX
• Quality insurance
• The Regression Testing Kit
• More information

Project contents

The whole EMFexplorer project comprises:

• A graphics library specialized in reusing documents, provided they are first formatted as EMF (Enhanced Metafile Format; Microsoft format), WMF (Windows Metafile), and any bitmap format supported by GDI+ (bmp, jpeg, png, tiff, gif at the time of writing)
• A demonstration application based on this library (EMFexplorer.exe)
• A Web site (http://frazmitic.free.fr/emfexplorer/) targeting programmers interested in electronic documents production
• A corpus of documents going from the simplest to the most difficult in terms of required treatments (available now; not free)
• A cookbook: EMFexplorer, a GDI+ Experiment (coming soon; not free)

Related work:

• A regression testing tool (available now; not free)

Types of EMFs

Beginning with GDI+, there are three EMF flavors:

• EMF: the pre-Windows 2000 Enhanced metafile, containing well-documented records;
• EMF+ Only: Windows 2000 version (records are placed in comments);
• EMF+ Dual, containing both categories of records.

EMFexplorer 1.0.beta doesn't parse EMF+ records. It passes EMF+ Only metafiles directly to GDI+. But you can save them as EMF or EMF+ Dual, and reload them to get them rendered by our library.

Project architecture

This is mainly for developers. End-users will use EMFexplorer.exe and, seamlessly, SCEMFAx.ocx when developers place it on HTML pages or forms.

EMFexplorer Architecture

The ActiveX

When placed on a web page, this scriptable component will download an image progressively, decompress it if necessary, and display it at the same time (like an interlaced image). Note that the SCEMFAx.ocx included in binary distribution version 1.0.beta is not signed. Internet Explorer may display a warning about it. And in high security mode, IE won't load it at all. So to test this component, set the security level to medium.

Quality insurance

EMFexplorer version 1.0.beta has successfully passed the tests on a large corpus:

• More than 600 Mega-bytes
• More than 6000 pages
• Documents created on various systems: Windows95, 98, 2000, NT, XP
• By various applications

  Application	File extensions	Application	File extensions
  Access	.mdb	Notepad	.txt
  Adobe Acrobat	.pdf	Oracle	.or5
  Autocad	.dxf	PowerPlay	.ppr
  Business Object	.rep	PowerPoint	.ppt
  Corel Show	.shw	Publisher	.pub
  Excel	.xls	QuattroPro	.wb3
  FrontPage	.html	Visio	.vsd
  Internet Explorer	.html, .gif, .jpg, .png	Visual Studio	.h, .c, .cpp
  Lotus 123	.wk4	Word	.doc, .wri
  Microsoft Paint	.bmp, .jpeg	WordPerfect	.wpd
  Netscape	.html	Write	.wri

  EMFexplorer Quality Control

With this resource, almost any kind of EMF that can be encountered may be tested (at the time of writing, there are 122 types of EMF records).

The Regression Testing Kit

For developers:
If you modify the source code, you will probably want to ensure that your modifications did not introduce new bugs. One way to check this is to run a complete test on a known set of EMF images. You may decide to acquire our Regression Testing Kit, containing:

• The 6000 pages corpus;
• A validation program that is able to point out differences between images produced by your new rendering code and a (grow-able) reference database.

Note that this kit is a separate work, and is not free. It can be used with any image rendering program, not just with EMFexplorer. If you are interested, contact Smith Charles (smith.charles@free.fr).

More information

For more information, check the following pages:

• Screen Shots: to see the user interface
• FAQ: for both end-uses and developers
• Issues: mainly for developers
• Downloads: to get binaries and source code

Other links will be added here as the project's documentation is completed.

Copyright © 2004 Smith Charles. All rights reserved.

This software is provided AS-IS with no warranty, either express or implied. This software is distributed under license and may not be copied, modified or distributed except as expressly authorized under the terms of the license contained in the file LICENSE in this distribution.

EMFexplorer version 1.0.beta, 15 September 2004.