Or he could do what real Delphi developers do:
He commented out the entire DrawText block. He replaced it with TTextMetric calls that were deprecated in Windows 10 but still worked . He added compiler directives:
Marco picked up a red marker, crossed it out, and wrote underneath: "No. We can't even migrate it to a patch." Quickreport For Delphi 11 Alexandria UPD
His hands hovered over the keyboard. He could rewrite the entire reporting module in FastReport. That would take three weeks. He could export everything to PDF via a third-party library. That would take two days, but the client’s internal audit required raw, printable QRP formats.
Marco smiled. He loved this part. He opened WinApi.Printer.hpp and the new Vcl.Printers.pas . He saw the change: the Canvas property was now strictly protected. He couldn't inherit from TQRPrinter to fix it—the damage was deep. Or he could do what real Delphi developers
As he walked to the break room, he passed the whiteboard. Someone had written a question weeks ago: "Can we migrate QuickReport to FireMonkey?"
{$IFDEF DELPHI11_UPD} // Use legacy GDI calls for backward compatibility DrawTextA(Canvas.Handle, PAnsiChar(AnsiString(Text)), -1, Rect, DT_LEFT); {$ELSE} // Normal modern code Canvas.TextOut(X, Y, Text); {$ENDIF} At 3:45 AM, the compile succeeded. No errors. No warnings. The EXE was built. We can't even migrate it to a patch
implementation
type TQRPrinterHack = class(TQRPrinter) private function GetCanvasHack: TCanvas; public property CanvasHack: TCanvas read GetCanvasHack; end;
Perfect.
At 12:03 AM, Marco opened the source. Not the application source—the QuickReport source. He’d kept a copy of the full source code for QuickReport 6, a relic from the CodeGear era. He dropped the QR6 folder into his project’s search path, bypassing the precompiled DCUs provided by the GetIt package manager.