Consider a text book made with iBooks Author, using HTML widgets for interactive features, for example a quiz at the end of every chapter. You end up with a lot of widgets (one per chapter) that share a lot of assets (image files, javascript libraries).
Casual use of iBooks Author seems to indicate that every widget is its own independent bundle that gets copied into the book. This would be horribly wasteful in this scenario.
Can I include the same bundle multiple times (so that is appears in many locations, but does not take up redundant disk space)?
Can I pass parameters to the widget (so that I can tell it which chapter's data to display)?
If 1+2 don't work, can a widget refer to assets stored in a shared location somewhere else in the same book (so that I can produce fifty lean widgets that don't have to contain images and Javascript themselves)?
Just have an answer for 3., still trying to figure out the other two.
The ibooks file created by IBA is basically an EPUB document. Because this is the case, you can refer to files within the package itself with HTML from your widgets.
IBA creates an assets folder where it stores all the images, widgets, and other items.
For example, <img src='../../images/image.jpg' />
in the HTML in your widget will display image.jpg.
To see and add images, js, whatever to the iBook after it is generated, unzip your iBooks file.
You can include the same bundle multiple times, but I believe it doesn't share all the assets so each copy takes up space.
You can't pass parameters to the widget as far as I can tell. I wrote this somewhere else, too, but we built a quiz widget that was at the end of each chapter and we ended up just cloning code for the widget and setting all the variables via JSON. That turned out to be the easiest way.
localstorage is shared between all the widgets, so you can store shared information there (base-64 encode the images?).
Related
I would like to display a slideshow in detail mode, if the news features several pictures.
For example, previously I used tt_news, and its rgsmoothgallery extension met this need.
Do you know a simple solution for tx_news?
My system: Typo3 7.6.18 - tx_news 6.0.0
you need to build the appropiate HTML markup in your templates.
Slideshows, lightboxes, accordions, tabs, ... need a special markup so the initializing javascript can identify all parts and rebuild the DOM. As it is about which JS-lib you use you need to know which tags are expected, which data is expected. Look in the documentation of the JS-lib.
In general you have the include of the JS-lib,
then you build your HTML,
somewhere you call something like onLoad("initSlideshow('.slideshow', options)" so that the JS can modify your DOM in all the (div?) tags which have a class 'slideshow'. Often options could be given in parameters or in data-attributes.
The rebuild of the DOM includes adding eventhandler so you can interact with the content.
As there are multiple libs and also multiple content it is easier to do this individually per installation than to build an extension which adds just one JS lib to very special content. If an extension would modify the templates of news, you can't replace the news templates easily (or you need to build the complete template where you won't need the extension at all.
To edit the detail page you need to edit the Resources/Private/Templates/News/Show.html
Here you can include your slider.
To load the JavaScript file from this template you could use the vhs viewhelper v:asset.script
I am using VFR reader to display my pdf's. I need to extract the Table of Contents on a button click and display it in a tableview then it should lead to the respective pages while tapping on each.
Parsing the PDF Table of Contents is actually not extremely hard. You can use a tool like Apple's PDF "Voyeur" to see the structure or something like Adobe Acrobat's Preflight Browser:
You see that the "Outline" is a fairly simple tree that can be parsed using the various CGPDF* functions. The challenge here is to also parse the destination/action type. PDF doesn't make things too easy and doesn't give you a page number, instead usually you will find a linked named destination. This can be resolved by cross-referencing another table, it's best to look this up in the PDF spec. This is of course just one of the options, it can also be that the destination is one of the > 10 action types that rage from GoTo over named actions (e.g. Next Page) to JavaScript (e.g. this.pageNum = x). In the image above you see a classical GoTo action with the longer string being the named reference.
There are also some other special cases, notably for older latex documents and some pages from the PDF 1.1 spec that did things a bit differently, so be careful about implementing all corner-cases of the PDF spec to not get surprises later on.
Outlines sometimes also include URI actions, so at least implement that type as well. And they can also have font styles and color, so you won't ever get bored. Been there, done that in our commercial PSPDFKit PDF SDK for iOS and Android.
Can someone show a complete example of application cache with html, css, js, appcache file including CACHE, NETWORK and FALLBACK section. Also updating the manifest. Where should the coding be written?
http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/appcache/beginner/#toc-updating-cache
As per updating cache from the above link, where should the coding been written?
The code for updating the manifest is written by your sever somewhere.
Either in PHP or Node.js you must write and serve this file with the correct mime type as specified in the link you posted.
You can auto generate this from the css and js files on your server. Don't include html files unless they are dynamic pages.
The first line in the file must be CACHE MANIFEST
Now it assumes your are putting things into the CACHE section, which is where you need to include all the paths to your css and js that you want the user to be able to use offline.
To create a NETWORK section, simply print out the word on it's own line.
Under this section you should include pages that should only be used online.
Under the FALLBACK section include a page to show if there is no offline version available.
This is a brief explanation but you should be able to easily find a tutorial that will help you auto generate this file.
For more details about the cache manifest itself:
http://diveintohtml5.info/offline.html
Offers the best explanation IMHO.
Wondered if anybody knows how customizable Flash swf files are made, where there appears to be a template swf that the user can then input some changes (eg text or image) and receives a newly-compiled swf file with their changes.
Some examples:
- http://flashfreezer.com/landingconfetti/index.html
Constraints:
- user receives a single output swf file that can be played with all their changes included. ie there is no reading from an xml file, or using Flashvars.
Been trying different things for a few weeks with no luck!
There are a number of ways, but generally the most common is to either use a SWF generating library (like PHP's) or through server-side compiling.
Normally, this will be a custom or proprietary library which uses the same language that the serve is running (and there are open-source libraries for this in PHP, Perl, Python, Java, C++... etc). The SWF is generated and served up with the appropriate headers so that the browser knows how to re-direct it. Often this will involve a pre-defined template which is then modified slightly for the new input. Only occasionally does this involve the manipulation of pre-generated SWF directly.
The other option is to have a command line call to the Flash IDE or the Flex compiler (and, technically, this can work for CS3 and CS4, though in a very nasty and hackish way) to generate a new version of the SWF on the fly. This is often slower, but it will generally yield a more finished feel to a product.
You could try Swiffotron. It can modify SWF files and do text replace type things on both text elements and in compiled actionscript.
Here's a swiffotron xml job file that does some text replacing.
And here's a swiffotron XML job file that modifies instances on the stage.
I didn't check the site, but the only way I can think of is to read the requirement details through flash (this can be done through plain html also) and then generate the AS files from their templates and compile them at the server side (using mxmlc or other compilers) and give back the SWF.
I get the impression that you're looking for SwfMill. SwfMill creates a swf based on an XML file that you create/define. You could use SwfMill on the server to generate a swf based on user input.
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.