EPub reader XML? - epub

I have a doubt in this. If i have OEBPS instead of OPS. How can i parse it? Please help me in this.
<container xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:opendocument:xmlns:container" version="1.0">
<rootfiles>
<rootfile full-path="OEBPS/content.opf" media-type="application/oebps-package+xml"/>
</rootfiles>
</container>

I assume you are talking about the path name not the early incarnation of the EPUB specifications (the name OEBPS comes from Open Ebook Publications Specification iirc).
In which case, the full-path attribute simply tells your reading software where to go and find the package file. What's the problem? It's just a different directory. You should be using the attribute to find the file anyway.

Related

Generate html files using asciidoc in a rails application

I will try to explain my problem : I have a rails application which, for the moment, shows the files which are present in my public directory (there are only txt files). I would like to transform my txt files into html files using asciidoc command when I click on a button in my application (or automatically when I add a txt file in the directory) but I don’t know how to do that.
Thanks in advance.
I don't see this as being closed so...
The best way to go about this is to use asciidoctor, the ruby implementation of asciidoc. It is used in github and it plays quite well with rails.
To read all the files with .asciidoc extension you can google and find many useful answers, such as the one you pointed out in your comment.

A list of professionally-useful and safe file types?

I have a system where users can upload, well, anything really - and these files are available to other users.
I need to come up with a list of file types that are genuinely needed by professionals in different industries that are safe from hacking/viruses, etc.
.doc .docx .gif .jpg .jpeg .mpg .mpeg .mp3 .odt .odp .ods .pdf .ppt .pptx .tif .tiff .txt .xls .xlsx .wav
What other file types do you know of that are both useful and safe?
Clarification
Many of the comments and responses are asking for a clearer definition of 'safe from hacking/viruses' - I ask the question with precisely that level of detail because I don't have as sophisticated an understanding of file types and their risks as many of you do, and I would like guidance on 1) any file types that may keep my site more secure, and 2) if there are no 'safe' file types then any advice on how to move forward with a system that allows for flexible uploading and sharing of files.
If indeed any malicious file can be packaged as a seemingly-safe file, how can I protect my users?
No filetype is safe if the program you use to open it with is badly (or carelessly or evil-y) written.
You can't assume that all files with a given extension is safe from 'viruses'.
I can easily rename a malicious executable to .doc and 'hack' your system.
EDIT:
There is no (simple?) way to check whether a user-uploaded file is malicious or not.
The app that you're creating is no different than any other file sharing websites out there (Rapidshare, Megaupload, etc).
There is nothing stopping anyone to upload malicious files to those websites.
Safe files does not exists. The ordinary text file is safe? For example with content:
format c:
if some program can execute a content of the file... you get the idea.
So, here are not safe files - only restrictions to RUN code (programs). (And I understand if this answer does not like.) :)
For "useful" you'll need to ask your customers.
For safe, there's no such thing because a file extension is just a part of the file name that gives a suggestion of what type of file it is. It need not accurately represent the type, and is easily manipulated.
Rather than protecting based on file type. I would get a 3rd party to virus scan each file on upload. Reject those which are identified as positive.
The list is pretty endless! A quick search finds http://filext.com/alphalist.php?extstart=^A
Well you can include all data files and exlude all executable/script files.
One list of executable file extensions is here: http://pcsupport.about.com/od/tipstricks/a/execfileext.htm
you may look other sources to inprove coverage.
Edit: for second part of the question addressing sequrity-
It would be best to have bunch of anti malware software installed on the server to check each sumbission - they are designed for this specialized task, use them. Anyways no executable file is professionaly useful as long as people are not looking for crackware.

What is contacts.edb structure?

Windows Live Messenger creates a number of files like
C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live Contacts{ae86acef-5a45-4447-bc32-521fc9289e1a}\DBStore\contacts.edb
and stores contacts within. When looking on such files, it is obviouos that they have strict structure. However, I failed to find the description of contacts.edb structure in internet.
Does anybody knows this structure? Or maybe there are some parser sources available? (I do not need a exe for that, I know about NirSoft one).
There is a project called libesedb which might be of use here.
The contacts.edb file is an ESEBD file.

Creating Microsoft Word (.docx) documents in Ruby

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.

Reading ePub format

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.

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