Is there any recent developments in web based printing?
I know using #media print in CSS, PDF based solution or iTextSharp but they are not really easy (except #media print) but alignment is little tricky if receipt contains barcodes or if I have to format for A5 etc.,
Is there anything new in HTML5 which will support this?
I would like to print receipts from a Django based webapplication.
Any tips?
Thanks.
You should definitely go with media="print" solution for 99% of your printing needs. For complex receipts that need absolute positioning, I've used PISA with table positioning and extremely rigid definitions for the page layout (think as if you're writing an email template).
But no, HTML5 will not save you. It gives you nothing new with respect to printing.
Related
When I try to print my Ember.js page application, templates aren't displayed on the sheet (it only displays a big empty white section). Any explanations or solutions?
Thank you
You will need to use traditional media queries to implement the ability to print from your Ember app. As far as I am aware there, no one has created an ember addon to support print functionality at this time. (See here where it doesn't look like anyone has a good suggestion for a similar question.) I can imagine it would be difficult to support generic functionality for printing that looks decent across apps, which may explain why no one has attempted to create an add on at this time.
I have what seems like a simple task. I wrote a Windows application using C++. Now I need to add to it a capability to print forms -- nothing fancy, just plain text, with lines, tables, and simple graphics. Besides printing, a user needs to be able to preview on the screen all forms being printed.
Previously I was able to get away with this task by using an embedded Internet Explorer control and design all forms in HTML (which I like -- the HTML part.) But the problem comes with IE... hmm... I wish I had a nickel every time I heard that phrase :) Anyway, IE can print an HTML page but it does not provide any easy way for users of my software to customize page size, page margins, etc.
I spent a good deal of the last week trying to make IE Print Templates work with what I need ... but eventually failed. That stuff is very poorly documented and what I was able to do seems to randomly crash on me. So at this point I gave up on IE...
So my question to you -- is there a way to incorporate printing into my C++ program for the purposes like I described above?
If I remember correctly, printers have their own HDC, and you can draw on it. That'll work if have something simple. If you want to render HTML page using pure WinAPI, you're in big trouble.
I'd advise to abandon winapi and try GUI framework instead.
Qt 4(and 5, most likely) has text editor that can display rich text, layout engine for rich text, component that can display web pages. Read documentation a bit, and you will most likely find a way to render web page onto printer instead of screen. So far it looks like exactly what you would need.
Using Qt will add dependencies (20+ MB of DLLs for your project), but, IMO< it is a better idea than trying to use IE COM interfaces.
If you don't want to use Qt, you could try something like WebKIT, but I had some bad experiences with it, plus Qt might be just easier to use.
Additional info on printing: Printing with Qt.
Try searching for GDI, if you want to use win32 builtins.
Or use another toolkit like wxWidgets. Or consider writing to PDF with some library. Or let LaTeX do the heavy lifting - writing text files is easy. The LaTeX-way works as long as you don't want to modify your output depending on the layout (one Use-Case that doesn't work with LaTeX is the "balance" at the top/bottom of each page.)
Consider having your program generate XML files and using XSLT to render them into HTML.
By attaching stylesheets you will make it much easier to customize the presentation.
I'm working on a project, in which we design a localized version of an existing site (written in English) for another country (which is not English-speaking). And the business requirement is "no English text for all possible and impossible cases".
Does anyone know if there is a checker software/service which could check if a site is fully translated, that is which checks that there are no English text in it.
I new that there are sites for checking broken links, html validity etc, I need something like http://validator.w3.org/checklink but for checking that on all pages of the site there is no English text.
The reasons I think this way is needed are:
1. There is a lot of code which is common (both on backend and frontend) for all countries
2. If someone commits anything to the common code I need to be sure that this will not lead to english text issues in localized version.
3. From business point of view it is preferable that site does not support some functionality, than it shows english text ( legal matters)
4. The code both on frontend and backend changes a lot
5. There are a lot of files which affect text on the client's screen. Not just one with messages, unfortunately. And some of messages comes from backend, but most of them are in frontend
6. Due to all those fact currently someone manually fills all the forms and watch with his own eyes, and that is before each deploy...
I think you're approaching the problem from the wrong direction. You're looking for an algorithm or webcrawler that can detect wether any text is English or not? I don't know, but I doubt such a thing even exists.
If you have translated the website, you have full access to the codebase and/or translation texts, right? Can't you just open both the English and non-English strings files (.resx or whatever you are using) in a comparetool like Notepad++ to check the differences to see if there are any missing strings? And check the sourcecode and verify that all parts that can output user-displayable text use the meta:resourceKey property (or whatever you are using).
If you want to go the way of crawling, I'm not aware of an existing crawler that does this, but it sounds like a combination of two simple issues:
Finding existing open-source code for a web crawler should be dead simple
Identifying a language through n-gram analysis is trivial if there's a limited number of languages the text can be in.
The only difficult part would be to ensure that the analyzer always has a decent chunk of text to work with. You could extract stuff paragraph by paragraph. For forms you'd probably have to combine the text of several form labels.
I am doing some web data classification task and was thinking if I could get the co-ordinates of html elements as they would appear on a web-browser without taking into consideration any css or javascript being referred in the web page.
My language of programming is c++ and the need results for a couple million of pages, so it has to be fast. I know there is a Microsoft COM component which renders the page in a web browser control and then can be queried for position of different html tags. But this is not suitable in my case as it first renders the whole page which takes up a lot of time.
So as I found out, there are open-source layout engines WebKit, Gecko that can probably be used for this. But that's a huge piece of code and I need someone to direct me to the right classes or right modules to look into or any previous/similar work someone has done previously. Also, please let me know what you guys think is a good choice if I want to customize the existing code for use with multiple threads to make it faster.
Thanks
Generally, you would find that different page rendering engines do render the html in their own way and the results will differ.
The thing is that if you stick to any concrete browser engine, what you are to do is somehow bringing this engine into your project and using engine's interface to retrieve these coordinates. Kind of a tough task though, simply because you'll have to read a lot of documentation and crawl through thousands of files.
I think that right approach would be posting this task in some place, that is specific for the page rendering engine you've chosen. (gecko/webkit/...)
If you prefer sticking to something MS-specific, guess it's gonna be easier, but can't help you with something like class names or code chunks that you want to see. Probably somebody else could guide you in this case.
I want the DocBook documents in my SVN repository to look nice if someone looks at them in a web browser. I've started to write a CSS stylesheet, but I think that it will have significant limitations -- particularly ones regarding hyperlinks.
There is a large body of DocBook XSL stylesheets at the DocBook site , but they don't seem to be appropriate for browser rendering. I don't want to generate static documents and put them into SVN. I want them to be basically readable for other developers without much hassle.
I could write my own browser-appropriate XSL stylesheet to convert DocBook to HTML, but it seems like someone else must have already done this. I just don't know where to find it.
In a past life I used wysiwygdocbook: http://www.cs.hs-rm.de/~werntges/proj/wysiwyg-dbk01.html
You are right, the DocBook XSL stylesheets are very heavy, and are not really suitable for running in a browser. The DocBook Wiki lists some CSS stylesheets, perhaps one of those might work for you?
The only one I have experience of is the one which XMLMind XML Editor apparently uses to present DocBook documents.
I've done some XSLT+CSS very basic and incomplete implementation for browserside DocBook styling. You can check it out here http://github.com/arsi/db2xhtml
But I would like to see more advanced project if available somewhere!
[Edited because I misread the question]
You certainly wouldn't want to run the stylesheets via a browser and the PI but then you wouldn't want to do that for any reasonably complex content. Do it server side if you're running over a web server or as a batch task. Is there any way that you can interpose a server side process in svn?
DocBook is a complex 'language' and capturing even most of the subleties of DocBook is very difficult. Using the DocBook XSL is not complex at all and I really would recommend you go in that direction if you can. The stylesheets are designed to be customised and are extremely well documented by Bob Stayton in DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide.
After quite a bit of searching, I believe the answer is "there is not a nice XSL stylesheet for client-side DocBook rendering," besides the bespoke ones like the one I implemented.
Typically you'd produce a 'rendition' for reading/display. The rendition can either be PDF, a single HTML page, or set of HTML pages. It's rare that you deliver docbook directly to web.
Can I ask what you're trying to accomplish and why?
Is this for internal delivery or external?
I hate getting the question that asks "can your technology do X?" It assumes a lot of knowledge about the product (plus, usually the answer is "yes" but that doesn't answer the real question). It's always best when I ask -- "what are you trying to accomplish" -- so I can tell you whether or not any piece of technology is a good fit (or I can point you to some other piece that's a much better fit, or a better way to go about it).