I have been using "Plist Converter" to get my data from csv files (excel spreadsheets saved as csv files) into plists up to now and have never had any issues with it.
However, I am currently working on an app where the data I need to convert is in Spanish.
The conversion obviously still works but I lose all of the accented characters during the process. It looks like maybe some are just lost, some are changed to other accents/characters, and the majority are replaced with an upside down question mark that does not appear on the screen but I can see it in the source code.
Anyone help me get around this with plist converter, or recommend another utility?
iMac, Excel for mac, plist converter, xcode... that is what I'm using.
Thanks
Look at libxls on SouceForge - it comes with a utility to take a .xls file and create a .csv one that you can further process using command line tools. But it has no support for .xlsx.
I checked previous questions here on SO but I think I want my functionality to work a little different. I understand that .tif files are not natively supported in Internet Explorer and that an extension, such as AlternaTIFF, are available to remedy this. However, I would like the dialog to show up where the user can either save/open the file on the client side. I know that MS Windows Picture and Fax Viewer can open them, no problems.
The files are located on our servers and this will be an intranet site. Currently, I have a link to the files populate in the view but again, I'd like that option for the user to Save/Open the file.
I'm using MVC, which I'm a little unfamiliar with, and can't seem to figure this one out. Thank you.
You can do an action that returns a tiff by changing the headers so when someone clicks the link the file will get downloaded or using FileResult.
Example with FileResult (i find it easier): http://www.dotnetcurry.com/ShowArticle.aspx?ID=807
For saving them is just like uploading any file with MVC. This post can be useful http://haacked.com/archive/2010/07/16/uploading-files-with-aspnetmvc.aspx
My advice is that you convert them to .jpg or .png when uploaded using GDI+.
//You first upload the tiff to the server like the post above explains
//And then open and convert it to .JPEG
Bitmap bm = Bitmap.FromFile("mypic.tiff");
bm.Save("mypic.jpg",ImageFormat.JPEG);
And if you already have the urls of all the tiffs, you can always do a console app to convert all of them. Even if you need to use tiffs its a good idea to have .jpg versions to show on the web. You can even resize them to create previews and save some bandwith too! :-)
I need to export some data to an .XLS file, pdf, and print.
I already tried the simple solution: exporting it to .CSV with CHCSVWriter. It works for printing and saving it to pdf (I open the CSV in a UIWebView and get the PDF or print from there). However, to use the CSV to be open in excel has two main problems:
1 - First, as the name says, in the CSV the values are separated by commas, and in some versions of Excel, it requires the user to separate 'manually' in cells.
2 - I have hebrew characters, and I already tried all the string encodings, and can't have both hebrew and latin characters.
So, after giving up after days of trying to use CSV to solve the issues above, I gave up. How can I export my data to XLS?
The LibXL library provides this functionality for both xls and xlsx formats. There is no iOS version, but people say the iOS version is coming. You may want to contact LibXL support to confirm this.
EDIT:
The iOS version is available now.
This article explains how to programmatically create an Excel (.xls) file without using any external library. It just opens a file stream and it writes XML contents straight to it.
It is written in C#, but the core information coming out of it is the XML formatting used to create nodes and fill attributes for corresponding cell values and formatting.
Please consider I have not tried this myself, I found it while doing a search. Please feel free to ask if some C# bits are not clear. HTH
I am working as a Software developer for Mobile Applications. I am developing an application in which i want to retrieve the contents of the .doc files that arrive on the Blackberry mobile as an Email Attachment Part. Whenever i am retrieving the contents of the .txt files, the code written for the mobile is retrieving the accurate contents but in case of .doc files, it is displaying a lot of junk material in the header and footer of the actual contents.
So, my problem is that how can i get rid of this additional junk material as i want to retrieve only the actual contents of the .doc files. Please reply
Thanks
You can get the specifications of the doc-Format from Microsoft. Though, I don't know if they're complete or even useful. Another guess would be to have a look at Projects which have implemented it, like OpenOffice.org.
Bobby
Is there an easy way to create Word documents (.docx) in a Ruby application? Actually, in my case it's a Rails application served from a Linux server.
A gem similar to Prawn but for DOCX instead of PDF would be great!
As has been noted, there don't appear to be any libraries to manipulate Open XML documents in Ruby, but OpenXML Developer has complete documentation on the format of Open XML documents.
If what you want is to send a copy of a standard document (like a form letter) customized for each user, it should be fairly simple given that a DOCX is a ZIP file that contains various parts in a directory hierarchy. Have a DOCX "template" that contains all the parts and tree structure that you want to send to all users (with no real content), then simply create new (or modify existing) pieces that contain the user-specific content you want and inject it into the ZIP (DOCX file) before sending it to the user.
For example: You could have document-template.xml that contains Dear [USER-PLACEHOLDER]:. When a user requests the document, you replace [USER-PLACEHOLDER] with the user's name, then add the resulting document.xml to the your-template.docx ZIP file (which would contain all the images and other parts you want in the Word document) and send that resulting document to the user.
Note that if you rename a .docx file to .zip it is trivial to explore the structure and format of the parts inside. You can remove or replace images or other parts very easily with any ZIP manipulation tools or programmatically with code.
Generating a brand new Word document with completely custom content from raw XML would be very difficult without access to an API to make the job easier. If you really need to do that, you might consider installing Mono, then use VB.NET, C# or IronRuby to create your Open XML documents using the Open XML Format SDK 1.0. Since you would just be using the Microsoft.Office.DocumentFormat.OpenXml.Packaging Namespace to manipulate Open XML documents, it should work okay in Mono, which seems to support everything the SDK requires.
Maybe this gem is interesting for you.
https://github.com/trade-informatics/caracal/
It like prawn but with docx.
You can use Apache POI. It is written in Java, but integrates with Ruby as an extension
This is an old question but there's a new answer. If you'd like to turn an HTML doc into a Word (docx) doc, just use the 'htmltoword' gem:
https://github.com/karnov/htmltoword
I'm not sure why there was answer creep and everyone started posting templating solutions, but this answers the OP's question. Just like Prawn, except Word instead of PDF.
UPDATE:
There's also pandoc and an API wrapper for pandoc called docverter. Both have slightly complicated installs since pandoc is a haskell library.
I know if you serve a HTML document as a word document with the .doc extension, it will open in Word just fine. Just don't do anything fancy.
Edit: Here is an example using classic ASP. http://www.aspdev.org/asp/asp-export-word/
Using a technique very similar to that suggested by Grant Wagner I have created a Ruby html to word gem that should allow you to easily output Word docx files from your ruby app. You can check it out at http://github.com/nickfrandsen/htmltoword - Simply pass it a html string and it will create a corresponding word docx file.
def show
respond_to do |format|
format.docx do
file = Htmltoword::Document.create params[:docx_html_source], "file_name.docx"
send_file file.path, :disposition => "attachment"
end
end
end
Hope you find it useful. If you have any problems with it feel free to open a github issue.
Disclosure: I'm the leader of the docxtemplater project.
I know you're looking for a ruby solution, but because all other solutions only tell you how to do it globally, without giving you a library that does exactly what you want, here's a solution based on JS or NodeJS (works in both)
DocxTemplater Library
Demo of the library
You can also use it in the commandline:
npm install docxtemplater -g
docxtemplater <configFile>
----config.docxFile: The input file in docx format
----config.outputFile: The outputfile of the document
This is a way Doccy (doccyapp.com) has a api that does just that which you can use. Supports docx, odt and pages and converts to PDF as well if you like
Further to Grant's answer, you can also send Word a "Flat OPC" file, which is essentially the docx unzipped and concatenated to create a single xml file. This way, you can replace [USER-PLACEHOLDER] in one file and be done with it (ie no zipping or unzipping).
If anyone is still looking at this, this post explains how to use an XML data source. This works nicely for me.
http://seroter.wordpress.com/2009/12/23/populating-word-2007-templates-through-open-xml/
Check out this github repo: https://github.com/jawspeak/ruby-docx-templater
It allows you to create a document from a word template.
If you're running on Windows, of course, it's a matter of WIN32OLE and some pain with the Word COM objects.
Chances are that your serving from a *nix environment, though. Word 2007 uses the "Microsoft Office Open XML" format (*.docx) which can be opened using the appropriate compatibility pack from Microsoft.
Some of the more recent Office apps (2002/XP and 2003 at least) had their own XML formats which may also be useable.
I'm not aware of any Ruby tools to make the process easier, sadly.
If it can be made acceptable, I think I'd be inclined to go down the renamed-html file route. I just saved a document as HTML from WordXP, renamed it to a .doc and opened it without problem.
I encountered the same problem. Unfortunately I could not manipulate the xml because my clients should themselves to fill in templates. And to do this is not always possible (for example, office for mac does not allow this).
As a solution to this problem, I made a simple gem, which can be used as an rtf document template with embedded ruby: https://github.com/eicca/rtf-templater
I tested it and it works ok for filling reports and documents. However, formatting badly displays for complex loops and conditions.