LaTeX: Are there any web frontends available? - latex

As of now the workflow is something like, I import an SVN or a CVS repository and then compile a document locally on my machine to get either a ps or a pdf file. But I was wondering if there is a Web front-end to do all the stuff, like for instance, an editor using which you can edit the file online and then download just the pdf file by compiling it?
Any suggestions?

http://www.scribtex.com/pages/index
http://code.google.com/p/latex-lab/
latex-lab will build on top of the google apps editor base...
scribtex is hosted only it looks like.

Another to add to the list is TeXonWeb.

If you mean online LaTeX compilers, then there are two I know of - at baywifi.com (to PDF) and at ScienceSoft (to several formats). Haven't seen any full editors, though.

There is a CMS based on Latex out there at www.osreviews.net.

The best site I found to produce PDF from LaTeX online is PC Shows.

Verbosus offers an Online LaTeX Editor that supports PDF preview, HTTPS, syntax highlighting, code completion, templates, etc. (Additionally it offers an editor for Octave/Matlab)

This is less of a web-based interface than a simple drag-and-drop cgi script that converts latex syntax to a graphic... www.forkosh.com/mimetex.html

latex-online is a simple open source web service that compiles latex sources/public git repos and returns pdf's. It has both a simplistic web front-end and a command-line tool for interacting with the service - you might find it interesting.

One rather new possibility is https://texlive.net/
You can either interactively edit your documents or you can pass your document via the url to it. E.g. a simple hello world document can be constructed as
https://texlive.net/run?%5Cdocumentclass%7Barticle%7D%0A%5Cusepackage%7Bamsmath%7D%0A%5Cbegin%7Bdocument%7D%0AHello%20world!%0A%5Cend%7Bdocument%7D

Related

Using Your Own Text Editor On a Server

Are there any hosting providers which allow you to use your own text editor to edit hosted files? At the moment, I'm using Namecheap and I can only edit hosted files through their code editor which means I need to edit the files locally and then upload them if I want to use my own text editor. I'd really like to develop a site directly on the server so skipping this step would save quite a bit of time.
Specifically, I'd like to use Sublime Text 2. Google didn't help so I'm hoping someone hear could point me in the right direction.
Thanks.
It looks like EasyEditors might have what you need. It appears that you can edit the files on their site.

Advanced PDF Generation with Ruby / Rails

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.

Adding server-side script and RSS feed to Sharepoint 2007?

I am investigating if the functionality of some CGI scripts written in Perl that we run on a web server can be migrated to our Sharepoint 2007 server (MOSS).
The CGI scripts are not complicated. Basically they display and process contents of files that resides in the network file system.
For instance one script just displays the contents of small text files that are being added to a specific folder.
These files are part of a production process and cannot be moved into a Sharepoint document archive.
The CGI scripts are being used to give an overview on what is "new in the queue" for this production process.
When the production process has finished, it removes the files from the folder. But new files may arrive to the folder at any time.
I have done some investigations and found that using a "Data View" web part would give possibilities of displaying the data in a good way.
The files need to be transformed from text to XML format, before some xslt could make it look good in a Data View WP. I guess that could be done by some kind of server-side script?
But how and where do I add such a script to Sharepoint?
Would it be a good idea implementing this as an RSS feed instead? But an RSS feed would also require a server-side script, wouldn't it?
I am new to Sharepoint development and would appreciate any useful advice.
Why not just write a Custom WebPart to read the content of those text files and display them. This way you wont be making changes to those text files.
Note : The link to custom Web Part is my blog. There are tonnes of other articles in the net :)

Easy way to find a view file in rails?

I develop rails applications with my designer who has minimum knowledge about rails.
She works on Windows through file-sharing from a Linux server.
She always has hard time finding view files to work on.
I usually use 'grep' to find a view file.
But she can't.
If you have a good suggestion, please share with me.
I have an idea which may be overkill.
Is there a way to automatically add comments around view files (including layouts and partials?) in html file?
Like this:
<!--Starting app/views/some_dir/some_file.html.erb-->
HTML here...
<!--Ending app/views/some_dir/some_file.html.erb-->
This way, my designer can find the file very easily.
Of course, this should be automatic and development environment only.
Thanks.
Sam
I use the Rails Footnotes gem (https://github.com/josevalim/rails-footnotes) in some of my projects which allows me to click a link in the footer of my app that opens the current view (also shows partials) in TextMate. Not sure if it could be customised to work with a Windows text editor but you could look at the URL to work out the file name.
I.e to open a file in MacVim, it creates the following link:
mvim://open?url=file:///Users/steveholt/Sites/foo/app/views/projects/log.html.haml
and for TextMate:
txmt://open?url=file:///Users/steveholt/Sites/foo/app/views/projects/log.html.haml

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.

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