Is there any way with pure ColdFusion/cfscript to produce a QR code, without relying on external APIs or JavaScript?
No. ColdFusion cannot generate bar codes by itself. You need a separate tool or library. It is easy enough to install a java library, like ZXing. Then generate the images from CF. Alternately, you could do a <cfhttp> call to an external server that generates the bar code image for you, or basically do the same thing with javascript. You would not need to install anything for the latter two (2) options. But they still rely on an external resource.
Bottom line you need something more than just ColdFusion. What is the reason you cannot use either an external API or javascript? Because without either of those, you are probably out of luck.
Edit based on comments:
If the only restriction is the images must generated locally, then you can use ZXing as described in the link above -OR- any of the other components/libraries mentioned in the other responses, like Joe's suggestion which uses iText (though also based on ZXing).
Some other external APIs
http://cfbarbecue.riaforge.org/
http://zanstra.com/my/Barcode.html?barcode=3PTSP8827A231
If you really wanted to, you could look up (perhaps you need to buy?) the encoding standard for QR codes, which I believe is an ISO standard. Then you could write a program which would output a table with the appropriate number of rows and columns, each with either a black or a white background. I wouldn't recommend this form of "rolling your own" though; it's a lot of work to do essentially what's been done before.
Tim Cunningham wrote a library that is hosted on Github that utilizes iText that does just this very thing. https://github.com/boltz/QRToad
Related
I'm trying to write some complex Starlark rules that link and build multiple dynamic libraries on Linux using the (relatively) new cc_common APIs.
There seems to be 2 different ways you can create compile/link actions using this API:
Using the compile()/link() methods, which are relatively "high-level", and
Using the create_compile_variables()/create_link_variables() along with get_memory_inefficient_command_line() and then calling actions.run() directly with the generated command line.
In particualr, I'm trying to get #2 to work. My question is, how can I create the param_file to pass into create_link_variables? There doesn't seem to be any Starlark API for this.
https://docs.bazel.build/versions/1.1.0/skylark/lib/cc_common.html#create_link_variables
agoessling I have shared a couple of source files for you here
It should give you a pretty good idea of how this lower level cc_common API can be used end to end.
There are still known holes in this API, i.e. not everything possible with the built-in cc rules also possible through cc_common, but I would say 90% is available.
I am not associated with the Bazel team and the code is the result of my own digging and sniffing. No warranties, but it works for me. Let me know if you get stuck on something - I will try to help.
If you get an idea of how to do some of it better (prettier, more compatible with the built-in rules, more platform-independent, etc.) I am all ears. Good luck!
Basically, I want to be to be able to pass data between Excel cells and
my C++ program. I don't have any experience in Excel/C++ interactions and I haven't been able to find a coherent explanation or documentation on any websites. If someone could link me some references or provide one themselves it would be much appreciated. Thanks.
If this is for a Windows system, you could always use one of the available managed Excel libraries, such as OfficeWriter or Aspose.
There also might be similar libraries specifically for c++, I know we (OfficeWriter) used to make one.
Edit: Looks like there are a few out there, like LibXL and BasicExcel.
If the application will run on an end user machine with Excel installed, you can easily use the Excel interop and keep Excel hidden.
In addition to LibXL and BasicExcel mentioned by smoore, there is:
ExcelFormat Library is an improved version of the BasicExcel library and will allow you to read and write simple values. It is free.
xlslib will also read and write simple values, I have not tried it tho. It is also free.
Number Duck, is a commercial library that I have written, It supports reading and writing values, formulas and pictures. The website has examples of how to use the features.
I like to print a document. The content of the document are tables and text with different colors. Does a lightwight printer-file-format exist, which can be used like a template?
PS, PDF, DOC files in my opinion are to heavy to parse. May there exist some XML or YAML file format which supports:
Easy creation (maybe with a WYSIWYG-Editor)
Parsing and manipulation with Library-Support
Easy sending to the printer (maybe with Library-Support)
Or do I have to do it the usual way and paint within a CDC?
I noticed you’re using MFC (so, Windows). In that case the answer is a qualified yes. In recent versions of Windows, Microsoft offers the XPS Document API which lets you create and manipulate a PDF-like document using XML, which can then be printed using the XPS Print API.
(For earlier versions of Windows that don’t support this API, you could try to deal with the XPS file format directly, but that is probably a lot harder than using CDC. Even with the API you will be working at a fairly low level.)
End users can generate XPS documents using the XPS print driver that is available for free from Microsoft (and bundled with certain MS products—they probably already have it on their system).
There is no universal language that is supported across all (or even many) printers. While PCL and PS are the most used, there are also printers which only work with specific printer drivers because they only support a proprietary data format (often pre-rendered on the client).
However, you could use XSL-FO to create documents which can then be rendered to a printer driver using library support.
I think something like TeX or LaTeX (or even troff or groff) may meet your needs. Google them and see.
There are also libraries to render documents for print from HTML source. Look at http://libharu.sourceforge.net/ for example. This outputs a printer-ready .PDF
A think that Post Script is a really good choice for that.
It is actually a very simple language, and it must be very easy to parse becuse it is stack-oriented. Then -- most printers supprort it, and even if you have no support you can use GhostScript to convert for many different formats (Consider GS as a "virtual PS supporting printer").
Finally there are a lot of books and tutorials for the language.
About the parsing -- you can actually define new variables and functions in PS. So, maybe, your problem can be solved (almost) entirely using PS.
HTML + CSS can be printed -- properly. CSS was designed to support this with the media attribute to specify that your CSS is for printer layout, not for screen layout. Tools like PRINCE (free + commercial versions) exist to render this for printing.
I think postscript is the markup language used by printers. I read this somewhere, so correct me if postscript is now outdated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript
For more powerful suite you can use Latex. It will give options of creating templates where you can just copy the text.
On a more GUI friendly note, MS-Word and other word processors have templates. The issue is they are not of a common standard or markup.
You can also use HTML to render stuff in a common markup but it will not be very printer friendly.
Does anyone know any more details about google's web-crawler (aka GoogleBot)? I was curious about what it was written in (I've made a few crawlers myself and am about to make another) and if it parses images and such. I'm assuming it does somewhere along the line, b/c the images in images.google.com are all resized. It also wouldn't surprise me if it was all written in Python and if they used all their own libraries for most everything, including html/image/pdf parsing. Maybe they don't though. Maybe it's all written in C/C++. Thanks in advance-
you can find a bit about how googlebot works here:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=158587
for example the "fetch as googlebot" tool lets you see a page as Googlebot sees it.
The crawler is very likely written in C or C++, at least backrub's crawler was written in one of these.
Be aware that the crawler only takes a snapshot of the page, then stores it in a temporary database for later processing. The indexing and other attached algorithms will extract the data, for example the image references.
Officially allowed languages at Google, I think, are Python/C++/Java.
The bot likely uses all 3 for different tasks.
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.