I'm developing a desktop software to manage people and telephones, and also to generate (export) a list of telephones (also with a summary of the cities) that can be printed (like pdf). The part of telephones management is ready and was made with java and swt/jface. Exporting the list in a print friendly format is what has become an issue.
I tried exporting the list in HTML with CSS, but the result is not the same in different browsers.
I was thinking about generating it in LaTeX, but creating an style is getting too complicated (need an A7 page size, smaller fonts...).
What file format can be used to export this list? Is there an easy way to generate printable stuff?
Edit: forgot to mention that the file will be sent to a company to be printed.
Thanks!
Generate a pdf, it will look the same no matter what browser they use. You can use iText to create the pdf, it is fairly straight forward for a simple pdf.
You could just draw an image, it will stay the same on different systems and its easy to print. by drawing it, you can style it like you imagine, without learning any document format. It should be easy to draw a simple table.
Plain text is a very friendly format for me. Altough, this could be done with HTML and CSS, if you keep the style complexity level to a minimum. Try reading:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/06/07/the-principles-of-cross-browser-css-coding/
And be careful when choosing your properties!
Related
I am writing on a Note App (Android and REST API built with PHP/Slim 3). I am wondering if there is something else than Markdown to save notes to a readable and interchangeable format. The problem with Markdown for me is that there is no solution to style texts (e.g. colored text). It is also hard to extend Markdown with custom attributes.
I am already thinking of creating an own data format (or using XML). But this means a lot of work for parsing it. I like the idea of using a standard format to interchange it between client/server and between other applications. But the featureset of Markdown is very limited (by design for sure).
Do you have any tips on this topic?
This question verges on overly-broad, i.e. it may lead to an argument over technologies rather than a "this is the solution" situation.
That being said, here's an answer I think won't be controversial: when you say
"readable, interchangeable format... solution to style texts... custom attributes"
I think HTML. I don't recommend trying to roll-your-own format, because 1.) you are correct that it will be difficult and 2.) it will be even more difficult to match the feature sets of existing solutions
To sum it up: I like the idea of using HTML instead of Markdown. It is an open standard format and exchangable as well as human-readable.
The problem I see with all of these solutions: How to write a WYSIWYG-Editor with this in mind? I am already working with Markdown using the Markwon library: https://github.com/noties/Markwon
It is no problem to write Markdown in an Android EditText widget and render it. You can easily convert it back to plaintext (you can save it). It is much more complicated to get a WYSIWYG experience. You have to deal with every User input, writing in a second file or string which contains the Markup while the user just sees the rendered result. The user can edit/delete anything anywhere in the EditText and you have to take care that those changes will affect the Markdown String/File too. I didn't find an easy solution for this.
The easiest way would be to somehow parse the content of the EditText back to Markdown. But there is no getSpannables-method or alike for the EditText widget. I am thinking of looping through the EditText and see what character is there and how it's formatted. But I think this will have disadvantages too, because there are other things like bulleted lists and checkboxes..
I have created a program that should one day become a PDF editor
It's purpose will be saving GUI's textual content to the PDF, and loading it from it. GUI resembles text editor, but it only has certain fields(JTextAreas, actually).
It can look like this (this is only one page, it can have many more, also upper and lower margins are cut out of the picture) It should actually resemble A4 in pixel size.
I have looked around for a bit for PDF libraries and found out that iText could suit my PDF creating needs, however, if I understood it correct, it retirevs text from a whole page as a string which won't work for me, because I will need to detect diferent fields/paragaphs/orsomething to be able to load them back into the program.
Now, I'm a bit lazy, but I don't want to spend hours going trough numerus PDF libraries just to find out that they won't work for me.
Instead, I'm asking someone with a bit more Java PDF handling experience to recommend me one according to my needs.
Or maybe recommend me how to add invisible parts to PDF which will help my program to determine where is it exactly situated insied a PDF file...
Just to be clear (I formed my question wrong before), only thing I need to put in my PDF is text, and that's all I need to later be able to get out. My program should be able to read PDF's which he created himself...
Also, because of the designated use of files created with this program, they need to be in the PDF format.
Short Answer: Use an intermediate format like JSON or XML.
Long Answer: You're using PDF's in a manner that they wasn't designed for. PDF's were not designed to store data; they were designed to present and format data in an portable form. Furthermore, a PDF is a very "heavy" way to store data. I suggest storing your data in another manner, perhaps in a format like JSON or XML.
The advantage now is that you are not tied to a specific output-format like PDF. This can come in handy later on if you decide that you want to export your data into another format (like a Word document, or an image) because you now have a common representation.
I found this link and another link that provides examples that show you how to store and read back metadata in your PDF. This might be what you're looking for, but again, I don't recommend it.
If you really insist on using PDF to store data, I suggest that you store the actual data in either XML or RDF and then attach that to the PDF file when you generate it. Then you can read the XML back for the data.
Assuming that your application will only consume PDF files generated by the same application, there is one part of the PDF specification called Marked Content, that was introduced precisely for this purpose. Using Marked Content you can specify the structure of the text in your document (chapter, paragraph, etc).
Read Chapter 14 - Document Interchange of the PDF Reference Document for more details.
Can some one suggest a solution for the below scenario ?
We have menus from restaurants. Each restaurant has its own menu. The goal is to identify the elements in the menu such as menu item, toppings, prices etc and update the database.
Fox example : A restaurant menu can contain menu items such as "Chicken", "Vegetarian" etc under a group called "Sandwiches.
For that I am planning to use a java implementation of OCR. Will this work out ?
If u want to use OCR inside your code you can go with Tessrect-OCR with some native developement.Its a very powerfull library with having quick output.this link is for wrapper class for Tessrect or you can also use Tess4j alternative to Tesjeract(first one).This is the same library used by google and u can also add multiple languages support.
Convert the PDF to an image (using javacv etc) and OCR it using tesseract or tess4j. It is not a permanent or the best solution, but it works great!
If you are typing up the PDF, then using it, there's no need to do this; simply read the PDF (see below). However, if you are scanning in the PDF (an image, not text), you will need to resort to OCR.
To read the PDF from a file, you could use something like iText or PDFBox
Interesting project! Java or any other language, I would think that OCR is not accurate enough for what you need. Menus are often printed with non-standard fonts and sometimes with background images making it difficult for OCR to accurately read every word. Then you have the challenge of formatting. Some menus may organize the content by Chicken, Vegetarian, Beef. Others may have categories like Light Fare, Entree, Appetizer, small plates.
This strikes me as a real data engineering challenge. While menus seem like they are hierarchical, they actual structure is very flexible and varies a great deal from one to another. Adding OCR to this mess adds typos to this whole mess, and now you need to be looking for words like "chicken" because you may actually have Chicen or Cichen or (h1ckn.
Maybe I've never used really great OCR software and I'm imagining a problem that isn't there. I would think that most restaurants type their menus on computers and you are better off trying to get them to share those files with you.
How to get print out a document (Which taken from data base or current fields form the form) in java with customized page size. Mostly important thing is I want to customize the page as my requirements (May be text alignment also needed). am Not a java hard coder. Your helps will me big help to me.
Thanks.
not clear what is (Which taken from data base or current fields form the form) , I suggest to go throught the 2D Graphics tutorial, there is detailed described Printing in Java
Everywhere I've worked that wanted well formatted output from a Java back-end we've deployed Apache FO (http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/) which allowed us to use XSLT to convert XML to PDF. It works really well, but has a pretty steep learning curve.
In a current project i need to display PDFs in a webpage. Right now we are embedding them with the Adobe PDF Reader but i would rather have something more elegant (the reader does not integrate well, it can not be overlaid with transparent regions, ...).
I envision something close google documents, where they display PDFs as image but also allow text to be selected and copied out of the PDF (an requirement we have).
Does anybody know how they do this? Or of any library we could use to obtain a comparable result?
I know we could split the PDFs into images on server side, but this would not allow for the selection of text ...
Thanks in advance for any help
PS: Java based project, using wicket.
I have some suggestions, but it'll be definitely hard to implement this stuff. Good luck!
First approach:
First, use a library like pdf-renderer (https://pdf-renderer.dev.java.net/) to convert the PDF into an image. Store these images on your server or use a caching-technique. Converting PDF into an image is not hard.
Then, use the Type Select JavaScript library (http://www.typeselect.org/) to overlay textual data over your text. This text is selectable, while the real text is still in the original image. To get the original text, see the next approach, or do it yourself, see the conclusion.
The original text then must be overlaid on the image, which is a pain.
Second approach:
The PDF specifications allow textual information to be linked to a Font. Most documents use a subset of Type-3 or Type-1 fonts which (often) use a standard character set (I thought it was Unicode, but not sure). If your PDF document does not contain a standard character set, (i.e. it has defined it's own) it's impossible to know what characters are which glyphs (symbols) and thus are you unable to convert to a textual representation.
Read the PDF document, read the graphics-objects, parse the instructions (use the PDF specification for more insight in this process) for rendering text, converting them to HTML. The HTML conversion can select appropriate tags (like <H1> and <p>, but also <b> and <i>) based on the parameters of the fonts (their names and attributes) used and the instructions (letter spacing, line spacing, size, face) in the graphics-objects.
You can use the pdf-renderer library for reading and parsing the PDF files and then code a HTML translator yourself. This is not easy, and it does not cover all cases of PDF documents.
In this approach you will lose the original look of the document. There are some PDF generation libraries which do not use the Adobe Font techniques. This also is a problem with the first approach, even you can see it you can not select it (but equal behavior with the official Adobe Reader, thus not a big deal you'd might say).
Conclusion:
You can choose the first approach, the second approach or both.
I wouldn't go in the direction of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) since it's really overkill in such a problem, since it also has several drawbacks. This approach is Google using. If there are characters which are unrecognized, a human being does the processing.
If you are into the human-processing thing; you can only use the Type Select library and PDF to Image conversion and do the OCR yourself, which is probably the easiest (human as a machine = intelligently cheap, lol) way to solve the problem.