Is it possible to convert a Sketch file to an SVG without actually having Sketch or DrawIt? I know it's theoretically possible since they're both vector, but I use Windows and Linux, so I don't have a Mac to open the files with.
Figma is currently free for anyone to sign up and supports both Sketch import and SVG export. It's a fully-featured design tool that's browser-based so it should work on all three major platforms (OS X, Windows, and Linux). File import from Sketch isn't a perfect 1-to-1 mapping with Figma because both apps have slightly different feature sets, but it should get you 99% of the way there.
There's no "magic" about "Sketch using a lot of technology that is exclusive to OS X" or not. That statement on Sketch makers' website is in the context that they do not intend to make Sketch app available on linux and on windows.
The real problem you have is as follows:-
The sketch file is an sqlite3 file and in it there are (currently at this time of writing) two tables, meta and payload. The payload table is a single key-value store, storing main and and BLOB value. So that's where you get stuck - you will have to figure out how to reverse engineer the BLOB if you do not have a Sketch program.
On the other hand, if you do have a Sketch program, you do not need to reverse engineer anything, you can query information from your Sketch file using Sketch Plugin APIs, which are well documented here - http://bohemiancoding.com/sketch/support/developer/ - which will allow you to automate a lot of the tasks if you have a complicated design workflow. http://zeplin.io is an example of a simple Sketch plugin that pulls out relevant "spec" information for a developer from a designer-created sketch artboard.
But back to your original question, Sketch itself allows you to export SVG files but that assumes you have the Sketch app. Long story short, unless you reverse engineer the BLOB binary in the sketch file (or use a tool that someone else created that can), you can't programmatically translate sketch files into SVG files without having a Sketch app.
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I'm developing an engine for a 2D game in C ++ and for some days I've been looking for a way to protect the images and audio of my future game. I know there is no 100% protection and that someone would be able to open these files, but I mean the regular user who just installed the game, prevent it from modifying the sprites, change the sound, overwrite the xml files with game map data.
I downloaded some games made in Unity and noticed that a .assets extension is used, in Diablo 2 it is used .ma0, .mpq, .data, in FEZ .pak, in Super Meat Boy only a .tp file. In other words, you can not open and edit any of these files in a text editor or unzip with winrar, they offer a minimum level of protection. How is this done? Do I have to create my own binary file format or is there any program that makes it easier to work?
You can't.
That "minimum level of protection" is even more minimal than you think. You can open those files in a hex editor and hack away at them. This activity is something that has been commonplace for many decades.
You can encrypt the data, but since the key must be stored in your application and the user has a copy of your application, that can be extracted and/or changed too.
You can add a digital signature to prevent people from modifying the assets then using them ("modding") but, again, this can be altered in your application.
You can obfuscate the assets by shipping them in a proprietary format, but this is usually done purely for functional reasons because, again, someone will reverse engineer them.
Once a thing is on someone else's computer, you have lost control of that thing.
There are actually multiple questions here, iirc:
How can users be prevented from reading game assets?
How can users be prevented from manipulating game assets?
What file format can be used to store game assets?
If you're using an existing engine, it probably has some support for this, and if it is sufficient for your purposes you only need to learn how to use it.
If you need to roll your own, you need to define your requirements clearly and pick a solution which fulfills them. For asset storage, a ZIP based format is probably easiest to handle, all languages have some form of support for that. To protect integrity, you should use cryptographic algorithms: digital signatures to detect tampering, and encryption to prevent reading. These will probably slow down the opening of assets a little bit, but in most cases this should be acceptable.
I am new to unit testing and the Qt framework. I have been assigned to write a unit test to test the opening of text files.
I have looked the the tutorials for Qt test. But I have no idea how to proceed. (I have to use QTestLib). Please guide me what I should do.
Boost libraries are being used to open the csv and delimited text-files to import the data in the application.
By testing, I am assuming that you want to check if the files are being read properly.
1) To get a better understanding about the Qt Project structure, check out this link
2) Locate the class that is actually calling the boost libraries to read the data, you might want to test this class (It depends on you how you want to implement, without any details, I cannot give a better explanation)
3) Create the corresponding object and invoke the reading of the file. After the file has been read, you can QVERIFY or QCOMPARE the data read by the class and the actual values. To use custom datatypes in the previous functions, look at this link. It is explained in the website, how to create and use custom datatypes for the above functions.
4) To run multiple tests in a single Test project (Qt), look at this github repo (I'm unable to find the website where it was originally posted).
I hope this gives an idea of how to get started with writing the test. It really depends on what your requirements are, without knowing the details, I might not be able to help more
from a c++ program i need to print a simple label. the label contains a text, an image and a barcode.(in my project the label is more complex, this is just for example)
my customer need a way to customize che label layout.
in the past in java I solve this problem using a report created with jasperreport. my customer customize the report with ireport and then i fill the data with an hashtable datasource (i never connect to an sql database)
anybody know a way to obtain something like this in java
really sorry for my scholastic english
Offhand, it's a bit hard to say -- most report generators assume some sort of database (SQL or at least accessible via ODBC) as the data source. I'd probably look into some that are free and include source code so you can change the data source (though I've no idea how difficult a modification that will be).
The other problem is that printing anything but plain text is somewhat non-portable; you'll need different code for Linux, Mac/OS or Windows. For Windows, one possibility would be Report Generator from CodeProject.com. If you want something more portable, you could use something like Xport to create XHTML output to be viewed in/printed from a browser (or any number of other programs that understand [X]HTML (there's also a commercial version). Of course, you could generate output in any number of other formats that support graphics, such as Postscript/PDF, LaTex, etc. This lets you use portable code to generate the report, but usually requires some non-portable code to invoke a viewer.
I've been tasked with creating a tool that can diff and merge the configuration files for my company's product. The configurations are stored as either XML or URL-encoded strings. I'm looking for a library, preferably open source with a license compatible with commercial software, that can do these diffs. Our app is written in C++, so C++ libraries would be best, but I'm willing to look at libraries that are C#-specific since I can write a wrapper that exposes it to C++ via COM. Three-way diffs would be ideal, but two-way is acceptable. If it has an understanding of XML, that would also be a plus (since XML nodes can be reordered without changing the document, etc). Any library suggestions? Should I even consider writing my own diff tools in the hopes of giving it semantic knowledge of our formats?
Thanks to this similar question, I've already discovered this google library, which seems really great, but I'm still looking for other options. It also seems to be able to output the diffs in HTML format (using the <ins> and <del> tags that I didn't know existed before I discovered it), which could be really handy, but it seems to be a unified diff only. I'm going to need to display the results in a web browser, and probably have to build an interface for doing the merges in the browser as well. I don't expect a library to be able to help with these tasks, but it must produce output in a format that is amenable to me building this on top of it. I'm currently envisioning something along the lines of TortoiseMerge (side-by-side diffs, not unified), except browser-based. Any tips/tricks/design ideas on how to present this would be appreciated too.
Subversion comes with libsvn_diff and libsvn_delta licensed under Apache Software License.
Here is a C++ library that can diff what the author calls semistructured data. It deals nicely with HTML and XML. Since your data is XML it would make a lot of sense to use this instead of plain text diff. This is especially the case when the files are machine generated.
I am currently trying to use this library to build a tool that diffs Visual Studio project files. These are basically XML files and using a plain diff tool like Winmerge is too painful because Visual Studio pretty much mucks up the whole file by crazy reordering. The idea is to do some kind of a structured diff to address the problem.
For diffing the XML I would propose that you normalize it first: sort all the elements in alphabetic order, then generate a stream of tokens/xml that represents the original document but is independent of the original formatting. After running the diff, parse the result to get a tree containing what was added / removed.
I'm just learning C++, just started to mess around with QT, and I am sitting here wondering how most applications save data? Is there an industry standard? Do they store it in a XML file, text file, SQLite? What about sensitive data that say accounting software would need to save? I'm just interested in learning what the best practices for this are.
Thanks
This question is way too broad. The only answer is it depends on the nature of the particular application and the data, and whether or not it is written in C++ has very little to do with it.
For example, user-configurable application settings are often stored in text files, but on Windows they are typically stored in the Registry. Accounting applications typically keep their data in a database of some sort.
There are many good ways to store application data (call it serialization).
Personally, I think for larger datasets, using an open format is much, much easier for debugging. If you go with XML, for example, you can store your data in an open form so that if you have file corruption issues (i.e. a client can't open your file for some reason), it's easier to find. If you have sensitive data in there, you can always encrypt it before writing it to file using key encryption. Microsoft, for instance, has gone from using a proprietary format to open xml in their office docs. They use .*x extension (.docx, .xlsx, etc). It's really just a compressed folder with xml files.
Using binary serialization is, of course, the industry standard at the moment for most standalone applications. Most likely that is because of the application framework they are using (such as MFC, which is old). If you take a look at most of the serialization techniques in modern application frameworks, XML serialization is very well supported.
First you need to clarify what kind of data you would like to save.
If you just want to save some application settings, use QSettings to save your settings to an INI file or registry.
If it is much more than just some application settings, go for XML files or SQL.
There is no standard practice, however if you want to use complex structured data, consider using an embedded database engine such as SQLite or Metakit, or Berkeley DB files. XML files would also do the job and be human readable/writable. Preferences can use INI files or the Windows registry, and so on. In short, it really depends on your usage pattern.
This is a general question. Like many things, the right answer depends on your application and its needs.
Most desktop applications save end-user data to a file (think Word and Excel). The format is up to you, XML, binary, etc. And if you can serialize/deserialize objects to file it will probably make your life easier.
Internal application data such as configuration files or temporary data might be saved to an XML file or an lightweight, local database such as SQLite
Often, "enterprise" applications used internally by a business will save their data to a back-end database such as SQL Server or Oracle. This is so all of the enterprise's data is saved to a single central location. And then it is available for reporting, etc.
For accounting software, you would need to consider the business domain and end users. For example, if the software is to be sold to large businesses you would probably use some form of a database to save data. Otherwise a binary file would be fine, perhaps with some form of encryption if you are really paranoid.
When you say "the best way", then you have to define what you mean by "good".
The problem is that various requirements conflict with each other, therefore so you can't satisfy all of them simultaneously.
For example, if one requirement is "concurrent multi-user access to the data" then this suggests using a database engine, but that conflicts with "as small as possible" and "minimize dependencies on 3rd-party software".
If a requirement is "portable data format" then this suggests XML, but that conflicts with "compact" and "indexed".
Do they store it in a XML file, text file, SQLite?
Yes.
Also, Binary files and relational databases.
Anything else?