10 Years

The History of VPE

In October 2005, Virtual Print Engine is officially distributed since ten years!

In fact the development of Virtual Print Engine started in December 1993, and the first version was released in October 1995.

At that time the internet was widely unknown and the first commercial version was released to the public via CompuServe, which was the biggest information source for software developers.
This was the beginning of the success story of VPE. The response and feedback of other software developers in CompuServe was very good and IDEAL Software continued the development. In short periods of time new versions of VPE were released, and with each new release important features were added. The first version of VPE for example had only a Word document as manual, could only display plain text objects (no Rich Text), knew nothing about barcodes nor charts and could only import BMP files.

Only one month later, in November 1995, v1.1 was released, which could create barcodes.

Only 4 months later, in March 1996, v1.3 was released, which could import all common graphics file formats.

In October 1996 version 2.0 was released, with an additional ActiveX and a Borland Delphi / C++ Builder VCL component.

In March 1997 the website of IDEAL Software was launched. At that time the standard internet connection was via ISDN with approx. 8 Kb/sec.

In July 1997 version 2.2 was released, which was already a very complete and successful product.

In December 1997 the first advertising in printed magazines appeared, and VPE became known to a wide public.

In March 1999 version 3.0 was released, which was a big milestone. More than 200 new functions had been added to the API! Features like Rich Text, Charts, the export of pages to all common graphics file formats, UDO's (User Defined Objects), clickable objects, scale-to-gray technology and other things had been added, as well as all device control properties. At that time VPE was split into three Editions: Standard, Enhanced and Professional. VPE's capabilities had been enhanced in many directions and the API had been reworked. Source codes for prior versions of VPE could be ported within minutes to the new API, but since v3.0 (March 1999) the API and the VPE document file format is upwards compatible to all succeeding versions and editions until today.

In March 2001 dycodoc - the visual designer - and VPE Enterprise Edition had been released together with VPE v3.20.

In October 2002 VPE v3.50 was released with the new PDF Export Module. The PDF Export Module provides highest performance, accuracy and many features, like compression, encryption, selective protection, document linearization, font embedding, font substitution and font subsetting, which can not be found in any competitive products!

In September 2004 VPE v3.60 was released, which provides a new .NET component.

IDEAL Software is working in parallel on the enhancement of dycodoc and VPE, to shift it from a forms designer to a full featured reporting tool, including ODBC connections, unlimited grouping, formulas and aggregates, culture specific number and date / time formatting, fully embedded JavaScript language to control the report flow, and more.

Afterwards IDEAL Software plans for the years 2007 and 2008 to release a Linux / Unix version of VPE and in a later step a fully unicode enabled version.