I have a templates written in RTF(with some tags which are replaced by data from DB in app), but when I edit them in MS Word, Word put some invisible tags to the templates, which destruct my tags(I must open template in Notepad and edit code).
Do you know some editor for RTF, which strict follows RTF specification?
Thanks
On Windows, the included app Wordpad is pretty decent in my opinion.
The RTF spec allows an RTF editor such as Word or a third party control to sprinkle the tags in-between the RTF text, provided that the actually RTF display is maintained. For this reason, there is no way to guarantee that your original template text will not be disturbed. For this reason, I recommend using an RTF editor API to do any search/replacement within your template. The RTF editor knows to put aside the RTF tags and access the original text as intended.
OK, I know that google find bunch of editors, but I don`t have time to try each of them to find out best one.
so I search for advice which is good, not which is avialable
EDIT: I found and for weeks use this solution
TE EDIT
and is very good, I recommend it.
Related
I wrote a documentation for an application in LaTex, and was wondering what the best way to display in a webpage. I can just convert it to HTML, but I'm wondering if there's a better way with all the nice css styling done automatically as in other web documentations.
I'm looking for something like Sphinx, but never used it, so not sure if it's a good solution to a document already made in .tex/.pdf
Here's what I did, (thx #Blender)
Exported the Latex file to html using tex4ht (texmaker) and used pandoc to convert the html file to reStructuresText, and edited that .rst to fit the specifications of sphinx. This was needed since I wanted to break the latex file to few different HTML files.
Then used sphinx to generate the PDF file. I think I'm going to keep writing in .rst, so it's easy to convert both to HTML, and PDF.
Adding the answer so anyone having the same problem will get some ideas.
My clients can enter text into textarea and have the option to use the markdown or textile filters for each textarea.
With some models (articles, newsletter, etc) they can upload images to associate with the model, which are displayed in a column next to the text of the text.
This worked fine for a while, but they have now told me that the want the ability to put the images INSIDE the text a specific positions.
What is the best way to go about this? I suppose I may have to use a wysiwyg for this, but would rather not. And how would this work for images which are not yet on the server, etc?
There are different directions you could go to:
Follow the path of Confluence, which released in their new version 4.0 a rewritten WYSIWYG editor, that stores as source XHTML, not any more wiki markup.
Leads to an update of all pages when migrating.
Was pretty difficult to implement. I do not know if they use any more the TinyMCE editor of previous versions.
Follow the format of markdown how to include images in your source format. So by typing: This is my text. !image.png! The inline image shows ..., you will have a format that is understandable.
You have to expand the interpretation, so that the !<filename>! will be mapped that is stored locally anyway.
You have to add clear-up dialogs for the images that are yet not known, so doing bulk uploads ...
You may provide a drag area on your view, that then shows the filename and gives examples how to include that inside the text area.
Go for something in between, by allowing users to drag images inside the editor. There are plugins written in Javascript that allow you to do that, e.g. UI Draggable for jquery
I have no idea how to integrate that image inside the text editor. Overlay?
So the second one is the easiest, and the user knows how to do it. If they only decide that this is the solution they want to have :-)
I think I'm going to use a combination of #2 above, and the Liquid templating engine.
So this is another exporting to Excel question.
I have a page that has a table with formatting by stylesheet.
When I export the page by setting the ContentType to application/excel and Content-Disposition to attachment, I can export the table to Excel (not CSV). However, it loses all formatting. I think it's because Excel does not load CSS and I guess that's reasonable.
So, in a scenario where I have to show the table on the web and also export to Excel, both with similar (even if not exact) formatting, what would be the best approach without using something like NPOI?
I am trying to minimize the work and keep the single template if possible. Is it necessary for me to create two separate templates: one with stylesheet, the other with embedded style in the table itself for Excel?
Having a single template with conditional formatting inside would be very messy.
Any ideas?
If you not yet solve the problem I'll recommend you to use Open XML SDK 2.0 for Microsoft Office (see http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c6e744e5-36e9-45f5-8d8c-331df206e0d0&displaylang=en). With this way you will be able create an XLSX file without installing Excel on the server. XLSX file is compressed (like ZIP file) collection of xml files. Open XML SDK 2.0 helps you create and change XLSX file as pure xml files. At the first time if you look at Open XML SDK a lot of things look like strange, but it's only at the beginning. There are so named "Open XML SDK 2.0 Productivity Tool" (a part of Open XML SDK 2.0) which can generate a lot of useful code for you. Moreover you can create a nice Excel document which you can use as a prototype (template) of the document which you will create. So you can solve the problem of complex formating without writing of a lot of code.
Look at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc850837(v=office.14).aspx for some examples and on http://openxmldeveloper.org/default.aspx. See also Creating Excel document with OpenXml sdk 2.0 as a start example. You can find also a lot of good stuffs on http://www.codeplex.com about Open XML SDK
there are several aproach
you could instantiate a excel object on your server using VSTO, and then write the document on memory and write to response the native file, but this aproach could be a litle expensive if you create a excel object per request, so you could try to do a singleton object that wraps the excel object instance
You can create a report (rdlc file) with a similar look to the grid. Then, you can have an action where you instantiate a LocalReport, pass the data you want to it and call its Render method. You then return the byte array returned by the Render method.
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.
Is it possible to search "words" in pdf files with delphi?
I have code with which I can search in many others files like (exe, dll, txt) but it doesn't work with pdf files.
It depends on the structure of the specific PDF.
If the pdf is made of images (scanned pages) then you have to OCR each image and build a full text index inside the PDF. (To see if its image based, open it with notepad and look for obj tags full of random chars). There are a few utilities and apps that do this kind of work for you, CVision PDF Compressor is one that I have used before.
If the pdf is a standard PDF, then you should be able to open it like any other text file and search for the words.
Here is page that will detail some of the structure of a PDF. This a SO post for the same.
The components/libraries mentioned in the answer to this question should do what you need.
I'm just working on a project that does this. The method I use is to convert the PDF file to plain text (with pdftotext.exe) and create an index on the resulting text. We do the same with word and other office files, works pretty good!
Searching directly into pdf files from Delphi (without external app) is more difficult I think. If you find anything, please update here as I would also be very interested in that!
One option I have used is to use Microsoft's ifilter technology, this is used by windows desktop search and many other products such as sharepoint and SQL server full-text search.
It supports almost any office/office-like file format, even dwg, msg, pdf, and files in zip/rar archives.
The easiest way to use it is to run FiltDump.exe on any files you have, and index the text output.
To know about the filters installed on your PC, you can use ifilter explorer.
Wikipedia has some links on its ifilters page.
Quick PDF Library's GetPageText function can give you the words from a PDF as well as the page number and the co-ordinates of those words - sometimes useful for highlighting.
PDF is not just a binary representation. Think of it as a tree of objects, where an object node has some metadata and some content information. Some of these objects have string data, some don't. Some of these are even encrypted, and some are compressed. So, there's very little chance your string finder will work on any arbitrary PDF.