I'm trying to find out if there's a way to embed an editable text cell in a PDF generated in a Qt application. I'm currently using QPrinter to generate the PDF, but if there's another library that could do this, that would be fine. The environment is limited, though, to C or C++, so libraries like iText are out. In terms of form capabilities, this pdf,
http://examples.itextpdf.com/results/part2/chapter08/text_fields.pdf, is a good example with the exception that I don't need a password text field.
Thanks,
Frank
This may not be terribly helpful, but I'll throw it out there anyway.
wkhtmltopdf is based on QTWebkit.
One of its command line options is to convert HTML fields into PDF fields (off by default).
There's almost no pdf-related code within wkhtmltopdf. Certainly nothing dealing with fields. Something upstream is doing the PDF conversion for them.
So find out what that "something" is and you're golden.
EDIT: That or spend a lot of time writing JNI wrappers for iText. :/ Having done so myself, I can say it'd be much more interesting to write a JNI generator tailored to iText, but far more practical to write a Java app that uses iText and then make JNI calls from your C/C++ app to pass the data it'll need and retrieve any response.
The form field borders are a part of the page, not the field itself. Odd, but that's not the first time I've encountered it. Our own software, LiquidOffice, used to generate fields with backgrounds AcroForms couldn't support the same way (now we use an icon-only button).
Those Real PDF Fields have their visibility flags set to "visible but doesn't print" within the pDF. I doubt wkhtmltopdf will let you control that directly. Patch time.
BUT, you could make a second pass with some PDF manipulation library to go through and change the visibility settings on your fields. I'm partial to iText, but there are many other fish in that particular sea.
Related
As part of my application, my client has requested that I include an automated e-mailing system. As part of this system, I generate HTML code and use automation to send it via. Outlook.
However, they also require a PDF copy of the HTML document to be sent as an attachment. My initial attempts involved using libHaru, which proved difficult to use efficiently, as I was required to create the PDF document from scratch, which required computation of the position of each of the lines in a table, and positioning of all the text, etc.
I was wondering if there would be a way to programmatically convert HTML code (or an HTML file if need be) into a PDF document either by using Win32/MFC itself or an external library.
Thanks in advance!
EDIT: Just to clarify, I am looking for solutions which minimize external dependencies.
You should evaluate this utility wkhtmltopdf:
http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/
You can call it from the command line without the need to run a setup.
I use it generating my output documents as html then cal a ShellExecute(...) to convert it to PDF. It's great!
Inside uses webkit + qt. So compability with modern HTML is OK.
Hope it helps.
I'd take a look at PDF Creator, which can be used as a COM object (that acts pretty much like a printer). I haven't used it to print HTML, so I'm not sure, but my guess is that you'll probably end up having to instantiate a web browser control to render the HTML, and then feed it from there to the PDF control.
Some possible answers are in this thread:
C++ Library to Convert HTML to PDF?
Not sure if they will satisfy your particular requirements, but these might at least get you started.
Edit:
Some other possible options here.
Not MFC but you can try QtWebKit. It can render and export HTML to PDF, PNG, JPEG
I have a Django app that stores client data. Currently, there are just over 1,000 clients in the database. Twice a year, I need to print a semi-customized letter for each client. Ideally, I want to be able to click a button/link and the entire batch is sent to the printer; I don't want to have to click "print" for each letter since that would be absurdly time consuming.
I have thought of is using Celery to chug through the process of printing all the documents, but I don't know how that would be accomplished. I would have to 'build' the document and send it to the printer without the user seeing this happen.
The other idea I had was to create a "web page" that contains all the letters on one page. Then the user can hit "Print" and the pages would come out of the printer as a collection of letters. Although, this seems sloppy.
Any ideas?
Thanks
I would advise using wkhtmltopdf for this task. You can then create the required letters from one long html with pagebreaks or separately and print them as you regularly print PDF's.
http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/
As wk stands for WebKit it will print exceptionally good quality PDF's. It's a commandline tool that you can just download and run. Small tutorial is here for you.
http://shivul.posterous.com/django-create-dynamic-pdfs-using-wkhtmltopdf
ReportLab is also a good option. But myself I don't want to create raw pdf syntax and Pisa the html library for ReportLab is not really that good. wkhtmltopdf is much better and easier to use.
I'd suggest using something like Reportlab to create the whole thing as a single PDF document that you can send to the printer in one go.
See the docs on generating PDFs from Django.
Okay SO. I need some guidance. I apologize for the length of this post, but I need to provide some details:
I've got someone who is interested in me to do a small project for them. The application in general is a fairly straightforward employee record keeping / documentation app, but it makes pretty heavy use templated Word and Lotus documents. The idea is you select the employee “event” such as commendation, promotion, discipline, etc., and it loads the appropriate template doc and you fill it in from there, and later you can select an employee, view all the “events,” and view the individual documents associated with each one.
Thus, the app must know where the .docs are saved when the user is done.
The client actually has a v1 of this app (it doesn’t do any management of the files or anything, just launches Word/Lotus with the document you wanted to view in a new instance, presumably via a system() call.) We’ve not gotten into a detailed requirements phase, but the client and I agree that for this to really work, some kind of control over where the user saves the .doc’s to is going to be critical , because otherwise the app provides them with the new copy of the template doc, they "Save as" somewhere else, and the app is pointing to the blank copy it provided them with.
Obviously, I can’t think of a way to achieve “Save as” restriction/control in any way via just launching a new instance of Word. The client has the idea of an embedded Word/Lotus instance in the app with the template doc when you choose one, but I’ve few reservations with that:
I’ve dug around online and I’ve read that whichever version of Word I borrow MSWORD.OLB from will be the one the end user would require?
I’ve tried to do the MSDN example of embedding a Word doc from here, but as I’ve come to get used to, the MSDN example doesn’t even compile.
Even if I CAN figure out how to embed a .doc file into their application, I don’t know that I could control the use of “Save as…”
All of this STILL hasn’t touched on Lotus (!)
So… instinctively, I feel the embedded Word/Lotus thing has to be more work than it’s worth in the end.
So I’ve had a few other ideas brewing around.
One is looking into using Office XML (and if there’s a lotus equivalent), and get the user’s “inputs” separately and generate the document on the fly each time. I’m not particularly thrilled with that idea, but I think it COULD work, provided I just use old features to try and stay far backwards compatible.
Get user’s “inputs” separately and generate a document in HTML. Meh. Works, very cross platform and easily parsed and understood, but not good if you want to be able to email it to someone (who emails a .html? Works, yes, very unconventional which to the average user will throw them off) and even worse if you need to email it to someone for revisions…
Perhaps some kind of editable PDF? I know there are PDF libraries out there, and the more I stew on it, the more this sounds like the best option, though I’ve not done much work with PDFs and I don’t know how easily embeddable they are / what options one has when creating them. I know they can be save-disabled, I’ve had that with my bloody state taxes before.
I need some input here. Here’s the TLDR questions:
Is launching a new instance of Word for each .doc as bad as I feel, given user can “Save as” document wherever and then application is left pointing to a blank document?
Is trying to support embedded Word as big of a trouble as I feel like it is / more work than it’s worth / likely to cause problems with supporting multiple versions of Word? (Forward compatibility as well as currently released versions?)
What are thoughts on the PDF plan?
Any other good ideas?
Word does allow for programming some "Save" and "Save As" control via its object model. Any subroutines coded in VBA and placed into your Word template will be copied into all documents generated from that template. Additionally, most menu and Ribbon commands can be intercepted by creating a module containing subroutines named for the intercepted commands. So, for example, if a module contains a sub named FileSaveAs(), any code in that sub will be executed instead of the standard File|Save As command. Lastly, this code will replace Save As commands executed via keystroke, toolbar, menu, or Ribbon.
The code below will launch a dialog box to a predetermined path whenever a "Save" or "Save As" command is executed:
Sub FileSave()
ControlSaveLocation
End Sub
Sub FileSaveAs()
ControlSaveLocation
End Sub
Sub ControlSaveLocation()
Dim Directory As String
Directory = "C:\Documents\"
With Application.Dialogs(wdDialogFileSaveAs)
.Name = Directory
.Show
End With
End Sub
Hope this helps.
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.
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.