I am working on Symfony-1.1 in an existing project. How can I read pdf files and extract text from them?
It's not a Symfony 1.1 related question, actually. It's a PHP one. There several libraries to handle PDFs in PHP. Following are some suggestions.
https://github.com/smalot/pdfparser
http://pastebin.com/dvwySU1a
http://www.pdflib.com/
If you just need to parse pdf in anyway and then process the text in PHP, you can also consider using a java library like the following.
http://pdfbox.apache.org/ (Is there a PDF parser for PHP?)
I want to write it from scratch so dont want to use existing pdf parsing libraries. Where and how should I start?
You should read the pdf references and read about the different versions of pdfs and how they are structured.
I hope you know that this will take much time (at least over hundreds of hours). It'd be easier to use a existing library if you have the possibility
Here's the reference for PDF Version 1.7 http://www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/devnet/acrobat/pdfs/pdf_reference_1-7.pdf
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.
We have a document management system written in PHP that uses mPDF to generate rather complex PDFs. We grew to love it, and mPDF allowed us to:
Use HTML/CSS to style the pages
Produce 200+ Page Documents
Support alternating Portrait/Landscape pages throughout the document
Automatically generate Multi-Level PDF Bookmarks
Import 3rd-party PDFs into the document
We want the new version of the system to be writen on Ruby on Rails, and for that we would need a Ruby PDF Generation alternative. We checked out Prawn, PDFKit, Wicked PDF, and Prince XML, but reading their docs (which are often one page worth), I'm not sure if they are as feature-full as mPDF. They seem to go for the "Easy of Use" rather than functionality.
Is there a PDF Generator for Ruby that is as advanced as mPDF, or should be keep PDF generation PHP-based as it is?
mPDF seems to be a composite tool that uses a portable PDF lib and an html2pdf converter.
it's hard to compare those to the libs/tools you mentioned. PrinceXML should be similar to html2pdf, but you could also use wkhtml2pdf (PDFKit, WicketPDF), which uses webkit and is free of charge.
combining those with prawn, which would translate to FPDF in PHP, should do everything you need.
You might want to look at Docmosis which has a Ruby example in the sample code for talking to their Document engine. The templating capabilities are pretty good and I've seen it producing large documents. I don't think it can stitch/import PDFs so you would have to use it with another library that can do the combining.
Please note I work with the company that produces Docmosis.
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.