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.
Related
Is there a library/tool that can be used in C/C++ that would convert the PS (post script) file to .PDF file, on embedded platform (proprietary operating system, no windows, no linux)?
I was looking for some kind of library that could be ported to our OS. I have found basically only Ghostscript, but issue there is with the license, if i understood it correctly, we would have to make our source public, which is not possible for us...
Maybe a little bit more background, we are trying to find format that will be easily viewable by user. We already have our output in PS for other reasons (printer). But now we want to provide this output in file by itself, so we are trying to find feasible file format. We are considering the PS itself, but usual user does not have PS viewer, so that's why I am trying to find something to convert this to PDF. So perhaps alternative question could be, is there some another format that can be easily acquired from PS, such that "regular" user can view it?
The main complexity for converting PostScript to something else comes from the fact, that PostScript is a programming language and PostScrip files in fact are programs executed on the printer.
In contrast to PostScript, PDF is not a programming language. When converting PostScript to PDF (or anything else), you actually have to run the PostScript program and record the graphic primitive calls, executed during the execution of the PostScript program.
This general approach is needed, when you want to convert PostScript programs from any source to PDF.
But you wrote, that you are creating the PostScript code yourself. Perhaps your PostScript program is just a linear sequence of calls to drawing primitives and does not use anything like subroutines or control structures.
If not, it might be easy to change your generator to do those computation at creation time,that currently are performed at print time. You would end up in a linear sequence of calls to drawing primitives.
When there are no more computations done at print-time, it should not be too hard to directly create PDF instead of PostScript. This answer mentions an open source PDF generation library, that uses an MIT style license.
The AGPL licence for Ghostscript would require you to make your source open, yes. However Ghostscript is dual licenced, in addition to the AGPL licence you can purchase a commercial licence, which doesn't require you to open source your own code.
Rather than converting to PDF you can, of course, also simply use Ghostscript to render the PostScript to a bitmap, its usually pretty easy to wrap a viewer around that.
I should point out that there are other companies offering commercial licences for PostScript interpreters which are capable of creating PDF files and/or rendering PostScript. Adobe is the obvious one, there's also Global Graphics.
These days there are not many players left in the field, if you want to handle PostScript, and the AGPL or similar licences won't suit you, then you will need to go commercial.
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.
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 need to write a program that displays a PDF which a third-party supplies. I need to insert text data in to the form before displaying it to the user. I do have the option to convert the PDF in to another format, but it has to look exactly like the original PDF. C++ is the preferred language of choice, but other languages can be investigated (e.g. C#). It need to work on a Windows desktop machine.
What libraries, tools, strategies, or other programming languages do you suggest investigate to accomplish this task? Are there any online examples you could direct me to.
Thank-you in advance.
What about PoDoFo:
The PoDoFo library is a free, portable
C++ library which includes classes to
parse PDF files and modify their
contents into memory. The changes can
be written back to disk easily. The
parser can also be used to extract
information from a PDF file (for
example the parser could be used in a
PDF viewer). Besides parsing PoDoFo
includes also very simple classes to
create your own PDF files. All classes
are documented so it is easy to start
writing your own application using
PoDoFo.
iTextSharp is a free library that you can use in .Net applications. Take a look at the iText page - that is for the iText project, which is a Java library. iTextSharp is part of that project, and is a port to C# and .Net.
Consider Python It have a lot PDF librarys (both creating and extracting) eg:
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pdfsplit/0.4.2
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/JagPDF/1.4.0
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pdfminer/20091129
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/podofo/0.0.1
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyFPDF/1.52
There are also good tools for using C/C++ code in Python and to create .exe form Python scripts. If you decide to use different language consider Python as prototyping language!
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.