I want to make a program in lua where I put the user puts several inputs and then press on a button and all these inputs are then printed in a certain format in a paper, How do I physically print a paper in lua ?
Accessing a physical printer and sending it a file to print is fairly complicated and is beyond the scope of what I've done with Lua so far, but I would suggest checking out this forum post.
Your best option might be to save the stuff you want to print to a text file (such as a PDF using a Lua to PDF library, there are several available with a Google Search, such as this one by cpressey or this one by jung-kurt) and then using C++ or some other language to send that file to a physical printer and print it. Microsoft has a pretty decent guide on how to do that.
Hopefully you find this helpful, have a great weekend!
Related
Context
A friend of mine is having trouble printing source code to a human readable format.
The compiled (I assume) programs of their welding robot have the .rpg extension. They want to collect print-outs in human-readable format, possibly for backup or future reference.
Their supplier can provide the software that accomplishes this, be it at a considerable cost (and possibly: an annual license). Because of this, my friend decided to ask me if a easier/cheaper solution exists.
Examples & Pictures
The files can be read on the console of the robot, an example:
I've done some minor research and I'm fairly sure this is the Report Program Generator (RPG) language developed by IBM. The Assembly-like syntax seems to match; it might be one of the later versions of the language.
My friend has send me an example .rpg file, the contents seem binary with some string literals scattered throughout. Screenshot of the contents of an example file in hexadecimal:
The Question
There is not much, if any, clear information to be found online so I suppose I have multiple questions (for anyone that might know more about this):
Is this (first image) Report Program Generator (RPG) code?
Does the .rpg file contain compiled or processed code? Maybe an intermediate format?
Is it possible to convert files as shown in the example, back to source-code or human-readable format, kind of 'disassemble' it?
If anyone knows more, don't hesitate to give me any information or ask more details if necessary. Thanks in advance!
And maybe not an important question but still something that bugs me (and might indicate I'm on the wrong track):
If this is indeed an RPG program, why would the compiled/processed binary have the .rpg extension, shouldn't the source-file have that? This leads me to believe I'm either (a) assuming the wrong things (the language, etc...) or (b) this is an intermediate format, easier for machines to read, that has to be interpreted by some kind of runtime system.
I don't think that's any version of IBM's RPG language. RPG does have a MOVEL opcode, but it doesn't have any of the others.
Also, all the versions of the IBM language have been intended for business programming. I doubt that it would have been used for robotics.
My guess is that's a proprietary language of the company that makes the robot.
There are some similarities but it does not look like IBM RPG language.
RPG sources are in fact source physical file members. They are not stored in the "traditional" file system but in OS/400 libraries. Therefore RPG sources have no extension. They can be converted to Integrated File System stream file though.
I can't answer this question I'm afraid as it's unknown language to me.
I expect possibly that the OP misidentifies the file type/extension; that the extension is actually .prg, and the files serve as instructions for a Panasonic Industrial Welding Robot. The following forum [drilled down to Panasonic Robots] bills itself as the biggest Industrial Robots Supportforum worldwide!; perhaps a good place to ask about those images provided in the OP, and the inquiry about getting source from what appears to be a binary instruction stream.
FWiW, the first image seems to show that the Ezed utility [on the console] gives that human-readable format, so then the question might be how to get that saved and then how to transfer that elsewhere; e.g. what type of comm ports and file transfer utilities are available from whatever platform/OS.
I want to build a website where people can create tests with questions and answers . I want people can type in math equation/symbol and equations in a textbox or something like that, and they will be store in database, it'also displayed on the web like image.
My idea is i will store the text user input in latex syntax and store it, then display it using MathJax, i don't know it's possible or will have better way to do this.
And a problem is in user input will have normal text with "math text" (latex), so how can i separate them and only save the latex text? Please give me some idea or suggest the way to solve it, thanks.
p/s: i'm building this site in ruby on rails, i found the gem mathjax-rails but it seem not working.
Consider building off Gollum. It is the backend for the wiki system Github uses and works fairly well with LaTex equations (currently their is a very irritating bug with less/greater than symbols, but is documented and likely will be fixed in the next release). I start using it this summer to take notes in a math classes, an example of a full page of rendered LaTex equations notes is here here.
Note: You must be logged into Github in order for the equation to render.
I am re-engineering a windows application to be ported to web. One area that has been worrying is 'printing'.
The application is data intensive and complex reports need to be generated. The erstwhile windows application takes advantage of printer APIs and extends sophisticated control to the users. It supports functions like page break, avoiding printing on printed parts of the sheet (like letterhead), choice of layouts and orientation, etc. Please note that these setting are not done only while printing, they are part of report definition sometimes.
From what I know, we cannot have this kind of control while printing web pages. I am in a process of identifying options at my disposal. While I prefer to first look into something that will help me print from raw web pages, following are other thoughts:
Since reports can also be exported to .xls & .pdf versions, let user download one and print directly. This however limits my solution to the area of application that have export feature.
Use Silverlight (4.0) for report layout definition and print. I think Silverlight 4.0 (in beta right now) provides adequate control over the printer. I have so far been avoiding the need of any RIA plugin.
Meticulously generate reports on web with fixed dimensions. I am not sure how far this will go.
Please share practices that can be applied easily in my scenario.
For reporting in the past on the web, using .NET, I like to generate PDF, Excel, Word or CSV files. I really like iTextSharp which allows for creating of PDF's.
Word can accept HTML, so that is usually quote easy. For more control you can get into the Word interops http://nishantrana.wordpress.com/2007/11/03/creating-word-document-using-c/, but they left me frustrated. Not for implementation, but I felt the clean up was poor.
CSV are great for raw data dumps and that is it.
For HTML, you can get nice control using a style sheet targeted to print media. There are just certain things you cannot control, like browser header and footer.
Flash also has better print controls than plain HTML, though you might not know it since these features are rarely used by flash developers. Almost everyone should have Flash installed these days, so it's not like Silverlight where there's a good chance of someone needing to install a plugin (doubly so for a beta version). I am not sure how the Flash printer APIs compare to Silverlight's printer APIs and if they give you the level of control you need, but their documentation is public so you can look into it.
Also I think exporting to PDF is a good idea. I don't see why you can't extend this to cover all places that would need to print a report. Basically instead of printing directly from the windows app running on their desktop, the same exact code runs on your server and generates a PDF that they can then print themselves.
I don't think you're going to have much luck trying to do it with raw HTML unfortunately. For one of our clients, we went with the "generate PDF" route and it worked out quite well. PDFs have the additional advantage that you don't have to print them out: you can just email them to the boss/accountant/whatever saving a bit of paper.
PDF is the way to go, if you want absolute control over printed output. As bonus, you can also provide the option to download PDFs in your application.
With HTML, you are at the mercy of user's browser settings for page size, margin and how page breaks will be handled.
I got a bunch of .DOC documents. I'm not even positive they are Word documents, but even if they are, I need to open and parse them with eg. Python to extract information from them.
Problem is, I couldn't figure out how they were encoded: UltraEdit's Conversion function wouldn't correct the text no matter which encoding I tried. OpenOffice 3.2 also failed displaying the contents correctly (guessing Windows-1252).
Here's an example, hoping that someone knows what pagecode it is:
"lÕAssemblŽe gŽnŽrale" instead of "l'Assemblée générale"
Thank you for any tip.
Greenstone digital library http://www.greenstone.org/ provides pretty good text extraction from word documents, including encoding detection.
Running msword in server mode gives you a range of scripting options- I'm sure detecting the encoding will be possible.
I need to add printing capabilities to an app and I have been looking around for information about printing. Logical/physical sizes, dpi, font scaling, etc, lots to digest since I never programmed printing into any app before.
Are there any sites that would offer a primer on the topics of page sizes, margins and all the other elements required to understand printing on Windows? I've been looking around for a while but what I find is either cryptic or years old...
I've been playing around with TPrinter, but I would like to build solid printing functionalities and understand what I'm doing better.
Using a report solution is not an option, even though I'm sure it would provide better results much sooner.
Two links to get you started:
Printing with TPrinter
Printing via the TPrinter Canvas
I think that you are looking too lowlevel.
Try looking at the build reporting tools (Rave or whatever is in your product).
Personally i am using a product called Report Builder from Digital Metaphors.
But if you want to do the lowlevel stuff lot og good information can be found at efg's computer lab - printing
Well, I have done things a variety of ways in the past, including the "hard way" with TPrinter. In fact, I recently had to do that again to run a special inventory label printer.
On the other hand, sometimes you are better off taking work others have done and using it for your benefit. I agree that ReportSmith isn't so great, and also it's Delphi (and Windows) specific. Using Excel or Word has those limitations, plus the fact that the user has to actually have them installed.
One thing I have done to make printing easy for some simple applications is just to generate an HTML file and call the user's web browser, then they can print it. HTML tables can be created relatively easily for numerical data, and you can include photos, etc. as well. This works well for some applications, and works on every platform where a web browser is installed. The downside, of course, is that HTML isn't the most precise layout language.
The version of Delphi you´re using is important. A number of Delphis came with print engines like ReportSmith (ugh). Another option thinking laterally is to use MS Word as a print engine. I´ve hooked into instances of Word & Excel before & utilised their functionality. As to raw printing using TPrinter or the print method of TForm you´d have to be pretty desperate. I seem to recall the Pacheo / Texeira Delphi books coming with a pretty good overview so you might want to see if you can find a copy of that somewhere.