I have been working on creating Epub for my work. I have used Aspose to create the Epub. In this process numerous word document is merged together and single epub file is created. Now I am asked to create an EPub based on a template. I have been searching a way to do it but I am no where near to the solution. I haven't even found the template for Epub which will render smoothly over various devices IOS and android. Similarly I have no clue how I will achieve this task programmatically. If anyone out there have any idea please provide me an insight.
As you may know an ePub is a file that contains a lot of html pages. if you want to create a template based epub programmatically you should link this files to a css and modify the structure of the html as the template.
If I were you I would use a regex to edit the html files, get the contents and place this contents in a new html page. Once done that I would place the html page in the epub.
I suggest you please create the template document (DOTX) using MS Word. Import this template document into Aspose.Words' DOM, merge Word documents, do other document processing tasks, and save it to EPUB using Document.Save method. You may also create the template document programmatically using Aspose.Words. I work with Aspose as Developer evangelist.
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Need help on rendering PDF using CGPDFContext. I am currently using UIWebView to display PDF but would like to perform much more operation rather than just reading like Highlight Text, Search PDF, Annotate PDF. Not looking for using any Framework or library.
Any help will be beneficial. For a start, code on how to render PDF using CGPDF and displaying it instead of using UIWebView.
PDF annotations are a rabbit hole. I've been working on them since 2010. The spec is thousands of pages. It's easy to get started but it takes forever to get right with all the PDFs and variations out there. Even a simple feature like bookmarks are harder than you would think.
To date there's no open source framework that implements PDF annotations. The above linked one can be a good starting point. If you don't have months/years to build something on your own, there are a few commercial options available - like PSPDFKit, available for iOS, Android and Web, which I am building.
We have a guide article listing the most important PDF spec documents.
Searching is another tricky topic. It's quite hard to convert the PDF text data to unicode. The Adobe CIDFont spec is a good starting point.
You shoud try VFReader, it is an open source project for rendering PDF files on iOS. It can be a good starting point.
I am a newbie in iPhone development. I am planning to do a PDF application for iPhone. The functionality is:
User will type their input in a text field (which is going to be the content of the PDF file).
I have to modify the PDF file through code while saving (paragraphs, tables, bullets etc).
User can save it in their own name.
User can send the PDF file as attachment of MFMailComposer.
So I have searched and got many links. However I didn't find any leading details to create and modify a PDF file in iPhone/iPad.
Can anyone please provide me a good reference to do this. Are there any alternatives to do this?
I've used this reference: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/GraphicsImaging/Conceptual/drawingwithquartz2d/dq_pdf/dq_pdf.html
It contains theoretical explanations and source code examples
Please use the below link to download sample apps for PDF Reader/Viewer in iOS
PDF Reader/Viewer in iOS
Also please look at detail about pdf creation, manipulation etc in below links
developer.apple: PDF Document Creation, Viewing, and Transforming
Fast-and-lean-pdf-viewer-for-iphone
If you were doing a Phonegap app I'd say got for jsPDF, which would enable you to create (basic) PDF files in Javascript. I don't do Obj-C, but a quick look on SO provides good links.
So this is another exporting to Excel question.
I have a page that has a table with formatting by stylesheet.
When I export the page by setting the ContentType to application/excel and Content-Disposition to attachment, I can export the table to Excel (not CSV). However, it loses all formatting. I think it's because Excel does not load CSS and I guess that's reasonable.
So, in a scenario where I have to show the table on the web and also export to Excel, both with similar (even if not exact) formatting, what would be the best approach without using something like NPOI?
I am trying to minimize the work and keep the single template if possible. Is it necessary for me to create two separate templates: one with stylesheet, the other with embedded style in the table itself for Excel?
Having a single template with conditional formatting inside would be very messy.
Any ideas?
If you not yet solve the problem I'll recommend you to use Open XML SDK 2.0 for Microsoft Office (see http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c6e744e5-36e9-45f5-8d8c-331df206e0d0&displaylang=en). With this way you will be able create an XLSX file without installing Excel on the server. XLSX file is compressed (like ZIP file) collection of xml files. Open XML SDK 2.0 helps you create and change XLSX file as pure xml files. At the first time if you look at Open XML SDK a lot of things look like strange, but it's only at the beginning. There are so named "Open XML SDK 2.0 Productivity Tool" (a part of Open XML SDK 2.0) which can generate a lot of useful code for you. Moreover you can create a nice Excel document which you can use as a prototype (template) of the document which you will create. So you can solve the problem of complex formating without writing of a lot of code.
Look at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc850837(v=office.14).aspx for some examples and on http://openxmldeveloper.org/default.aspx. See also Creating Excel document with OpenXml sdk 2.0 as a start example. You can find also a lot of good stuffs on http://www.codeplex.com about Open XML SDK
there are several aproach
you could instantiate a excel object on your server using VSTO, and then write the document on memory and write to response the native file, but this aproach could be a litle expensive if you create a excel object per request, so you could try to do a singleton object that wraps the excel object instance
You can create a report (rdlc file) with a similar look to the grid. Then, you can have an action where you instantiate a LocalReport, pass the data you want to it and call its Render method. You then return the byte array returned by the Render method.
Is it possible to search "words" in pdf files with delphi?
I have code with which I can search in many others files like (exe, dll, txt) but it doesn't work with pdf files.
It depends on the structure of the specific PDF.
If the pdf is made of images (scanned pages) then you have to OCR each image and build a full text index inside the PDF. (To see if its image based, open it with notepad and look for obj tags full of random chars). There are a few utilities and apps that do this kind of work for you, CVision PDF Compressor is one that I have used before.
If the pdf is a standard PDF, then you should be able to open it like any other text file and search for the words.
Here is page that will detail some of the structure of a PDF. This a SO post for the same.
The components/libraries mentioned in the answer to this question should do what you need.
I'm just working on a project that does this. The method I use is to convert the PDF file to plain text (with pdftotext.exe) and create an index on the resulting text. We do the same with word and other office files, works pretty good!
Searching directly into pdf files from Delphi (without external app) is more difficult I think. If you find anything, please update here as I would also be very interested in that!
One option I have used is to use Microsoft's ifilter technology, this is used by windows desktop search and many other products such as sharepoint and SQL server full-text search.
It supports almost any office/office-like file format, even dwg, msg, pdf, and files in zip/rar archives.
The easiest way to use it is to run FiltDump.exe on any files you have, and index the text output.
To know about the filters installed on your PC, you can use ifilter explorer.
Wikipedia has some links on its ifilters page.
Quick PDF Library's GetPageText function can give you the words from a PDF as well as the page number and the co-ordinates of those words - sometimes useful for highlighting.
PDF is not just a binary representation. Think of it as a tree of objects, where an object node has some metadata and some content information. Some of these objects have string data, some don't. Some of these are even encrypted, and some are compressed. So, there's very little chance your string finder will work on any arbitrary PDF.
I am trying to develop an iPhone application to read ePub files. Is there any framework available to develop this? I have no idea about how to read this file format. I tried to parse a sample file with .epub extension using NSXML Parser, but that fails.
The EPUB format brings together a bunch of different specifications / formats:
one to say what the content of the book should look like (a subset of XHTML 1.1 + CSS)
one to define a "manifest" that lists all of the files that make up that content (OPF, which is an XML file)
one to define how everything is packaged up (OEBPS: a zip file of everything in the manifest plus a few extra files)
The specs look a bit daunting but actually once you've got the basics (unzipping, parsing XML) down it's not particularly difficult or complex.
You'll need to work out how to download the EPUB, to unzip it somewhere, to parse the manifest and then to display the relevant content.
Some pointers if you're just starting out:
parse xml
unzip
To display content just use a UIWebView for now.
Here's a high level step by step for your code:
1) create a view with a UIWebView
2) download the EPUB file
3) unzip it to a subdirectory in your app's documents folder using the zip library, linked above
4) parse the XML file at META-INF/container.xml (if this file doesn't exist the EPUB is invalid) using TBXML, linked above
5) In this XML, find the first "rootfile" with media-type application/oebps-package+xml. This is the OPF file for the book.
6) parse the OPF file (also XML)
7) now you need to know what the first chapter of the book is.
a) each <item> in the <manifest> element has an id and an href. Store these in an NSDictionary where the key is the id and the object is the href.
b) Look at the first <itemref> in the <spine>. It has an idref attribute which corresponds to one of the ids in (a). Look up that id in the NSDictionary and you'll get an href.
c) this is the the file of the first chapter to show the user. Work out what the full path is (hint: it's wherever you unzipped the zip file to in (3) plus the base directory of the OPF file in (6))
8) create an NSURL using fileURLWithPath:, where the path is the full path from (7c). Load this request using the UIWebView you created in (1).
You'll need to implement forward / backward buttons or swipes or something so that users can move from one chapter to another. Use the <spine> to work out which file to show next - the <itemrefs> in the XML are in the order they should appear to the reader.
Apparently EPUB is "just" an XML format, so if you have an xml parser and the spec it should be okay.
Plus a little tuto? Have fun!
EDIT: you could also read some code here, this is for generating epub, not reading them but the code may be useful.
EDIT again: And see links to related question in the right sidebar, there are some links in the answers to free ebook reader which support ePub.
EDIT 3: You should add a comment when you edit your question so people who answer you can continue the discussion (if you don't comment we're not noticed of your edit).
So, The parsing fail because you didn't read the spec or related questions on Stack Overflow... *.epub file are a zipped folder containing XML file(s), not plain xml.
I read through this tutorial once (free registration required, sorry) and it gave me a great introduction to ePub. deverloperWorks tutorial here
I highly suggest you look at some of the XML processing libraries. If you just want to get specific information out of the XML file, then you can pick the right parsing strategy.
there is an open source project fbreader,
it also support iphone
http://www.fbreader.org/about.php
I'm playing arround to create an epub-framework for iphone apps.
At the moment (I really just startet) i can generate a title page with links to the chapters.
My approach is
Use quickconnect iphone framework as
a layer (maybe i change to phonegap)
which basically allows for javascript
apps as iphone apps
Add the UNZIPed epub as a ressource to the project
Parse the whole thing with a customized version of the epub.js (somewhere on google-code)
Right now I'm looking into pageflip, some kind of gui and minor usability issues (save the current page beingviewed)
I hope that give's you an idea on how to start
Jonathan Wight (schwa) has developed a ObjC solution for parsing and displaying ePub documents on the iPhone. It's part of his TouchCode open source repository.