I want to create a Word or RTF file with a table of contents (with links to each section) from Java. From my understanding, iText & Apache POI do not support generating a table of contents. Some clients of the app still use older versions of Word, so I need a library that supports the older Word doc format. Does anyone know how I can do this?
Thanks,
Glen
Look into the Java API for OpenOffice. It will do what you want.
Late, but possibly helpful to others. Docmosis is a good option here. It works over the OpenOffice API but you don't have to spend the time learning that API. It provides template population and manipulation, a range of data source options and all the input and output options of OpenOffice. Specifically, it also updates the TOC and indexes at the final stages of document rendering.
Related
HI all
is there any kind of abstraction API over Apache POI/FOP allowing one to use the same API to write both Word and PDF documents ?
I'm not aware of a unified API for the two libraries you have mentioned.
However you may still have a couple of options using a single API:
Use Apache POI to generate the documents in Word format and then use a Word to PDF conversion library to create a PDF from the word document. Another commenter has suggested IText
Use OpenOffice via its Java API to create documents and export them in Microsoft Word or PDF format.
Docmosis will do what you require, assuming you mean a Java (or command line) API. It reads doc and odt files as templates, populates/manipulates via the Java API, and produces the output formats OpenOffice supports. Have a look at the online demo on the web site which lets you see various output formats to render a document in.
When I was working on previous project, I was sure the Apache/POI can be used for Microsoft Documents.
we have IText.jar which we can use it for PDF generation and alteration. please check this will help you.
well i have been looking for a java based PDF solutions...we dont have a clean way i guess-still.. all solutions are primitive and kind of workarounds... No easy solution for this requirement -
1. Designing a PDF template using a IDE (eg. Livecycle designer ..which is not free)
2. Then at runtime using java, populate data into this PDF template...either using xml or other datasources...
such a simple requirement and NONE has a good "open-source and free" solution yet ! Is anyone aware of any ? I have been searching for since 3-4 years now..for a clean way out...
Eclipse BIRT comes close.. but does not handle Barcode elements ..OOB.
Jasper - ireport is also good but that tool does not have a table concept and is kind of annoying ! Also barcode support is not good.
XSL-FO has not free IDE for design .
Looking for a better answer .. got one ?
If it's a "simple requirement", you could create a report designer around iText and release it as FOSS yourself.
What are your key requirements? Does your input have to be a PDF? If so, you'll be probably working uphill for a long time still. Obviously you want to inject data and output a PDF.
If your templates can be something other than PDF, you could try using the OpenOffice API to get OpenOffice to do manipulate documents and produce a PDF. JODReports or Docmosis would be better ways of interacting with OpenOffice and Docmosis allows you to treat documents (doc and odt) as templates.
You can create a PDF file with AcroField through iText API AcroField values can be populated.
Note: Using OpenOffice you can create PDF document with FormFields.
http://blog.rubypdf.com/2007/08/01/freely-fill-pdf-form-with-the-help-of-itext-or-itextsharp/
You could use OpenOffice's UNO API. It looks rather heavyweight but at least you get something full-featured.
Have a look at XDocReport. You create your templates in word .docx or OpenOffice .odt files, then turn them into populated PDF files with Java code.
Does anyone know of any API (commercial or open-source) that can generate/edit PowerPoint 2007/2010 presentations through Java. I have a template in the PowerPoint 2007/2010 format that I require to edit/update. So far I have been converting the .pptx file to xml and then editing and storing it back as .pptx. But the file gets corrupted while opening.
Is anyone aware of any other method or API that do this in Java?
We have done it programmatically (closed source at the moment, sorry) so might be able to help, but beware of a few gotchas.
One is that the POI project (at least when we looked at it last year), was quite incomplete. It didn't do PPTX Charts - which is the one feature we wanted. Infact the POI site may not be upto date, but they don't appear to support PowerPoint 20087 format (http://poi.apache.org/slideshow/index.html). Everybody recommends this project, but our evaluation was that it was pretty much useless for generating PowerPoint 2007 files via Java. Your milage may vary.
Apose also had some significant limitations when we looked at it; not doing Charts in PowerPoint 2007 being the blocking issue for us.
Another issue is that PowerPoint 2007 can be quite buggy. We have had a number of progammatically produced PPT files that caused lock ups, but when testing, we found that we can repro crashes and lock ups with simple PPTX documents created in PowerPoint 2007 - i.e. not our code.
In the end, we did the following: Unpacked a 'template' PowerPoint file to a folder, then on demand, filled the template XML with new values, zipped it up, renaming various elements & delivered it to the user as a valid PPTX. Works OK, other than the odd PowerPoint crash when people edit the file. If there was a market for it, I guess we could package up the code as a webservice (i.e xml/csv -> PPTX) or put together a commerical package, but we wouldn't do it for free.
docx4j (apache license) now includes a pptx4j component, which can open/edit/save pptx documents.
Yes. Check this out http://poi.apache.org/, they just released version 3.6 which now supports Office 2007 format documents. The best part is that it's free!
To generate a PowerPoint presentation from a template file, you can use PPT Templates.
This library provides a fluent API to replace variables inside the PPT template:
try(FileOutputStream out = new FileOutputStream("generated.pptx")) {
new PptMapper()
.text("variable", "Hello")
.text("other_variable", "World!")
.processTemplate(PptTemplateDemo.class.getResourceAsStream("/title.pptx"))
.write(out);
}
With this library, you can process text and images in the template.
Another solution that may work for you is Windward Reports (disclaimer, I'm the founder & CEO there). It uses PPTX as one of the supported template formats and merges in data to then generate a PPTX (or PDF, etc.) output.
If the edit/update you need can be handled via the data tags in Windward, this should be trivial for you. If what you need cannot be handled by the tags, then this won't work for you.
Well as mentioned by GrantB best way is to create a template, then load the template , traverse the xml graph,update the data and stream out to a output ppt. We recently did it to generate reports for clients that had complex visuals and charts in ppt. You can have a look here generate ppt in java
I need to read a Word .doc file from Java that has text and images. I need to recognize the images & text and separate them into 2 files.
I've recently heard about "Apache POI." How I can use Apache POI to read Word .doc files?
The examples and sample code on apache's site are pretty good. I recommend you start there.
http://poi.apache.org/hwpf/quick-guide.html
To get specific bits of text, first create a org.apache.poi.hwpf.HWPFDocument. Fetch the range with getRange(), then get paragraphs from that. You can then get text and other properties.
Here for an example of extracting an image. Here for the latest revision as of this writing.
And of course, the Javadocs
Note that, according to the POI site,
HWPF is still in early development.
It's not free (or even cheap!) but Aspose.Words should be able to do this. Their evaluation download will let you play with small files.
Do the destination files also have to be Docs? You could open the docs in Office and save them out as HTML. Then the separation becomes trivial. RTF is also a viable option, but I can't recommend a good RTF parser off the top of my head.
Edit to say: I just remembered another possible solution: Jacob, but you'll need an instance of Office running on the same machine. It's short for Java COM Bridge and it lets you make calls to the COM libraries in Office to manipulate the documents. I'm sure it's not as scary as it might sound!
Hi I'm looking to parse spreadsheets (xls/ods) in Groovy. I have been using the Roo library for Ruby and was looking to try the same tasks in Groovy, as Java is already installed on a development server I use, and I would like to keep the number of technologies on the server to a simple core few.
I am aware that the ods format is zipped XML, and so can be parsed as such, but I would like to process the file using spreadsheet concepts, not XML concepts.
The ability to process xls files is not of major importance, but would save me having to save multiple xls files to ods (as this is for parsing data from clients).
Thanks
I would suggest Apache POI for access to .xls files.
I've never had to work with the .ods format, so no information on that one.
There's also JExcelAPI, which has a nice, clean, simple interface (for the most part).
Can't help you with ODS Files though.
How about looking at 'odftoolkit' ? http://odftoolkit.openoffice.org/
Groovy in Action has a chapter named "Groovy on Windows" that discusses using Scriptom, a Groovy/COM bridge (using JACOB under the covers), to access several Windows apps including Excel.
For OpenOffice, you can use ODF Toolkit, as Amit pointed out.
I second jdmichal's vote for Apache POI. I have selected it as our library of choose to handle Excel file input (.XLS). The project is also working on the .XLSX file format if you ever decide you want to support that. Based on your specifications, I don't think you want to get into converting things into CSV and it seems like you have established input and output paths. For anyone who hasn't had the joy of dealing with CSV to Excel conversion, it can get a bit dicey. I have spent hours dealing with issues created by Excel converting string data to numeric data. You can see other testimonies to this effect on the POI Case Studies page. Beyond these issues, I simply don't want to personally have to handle these inputs. I'd rather invest the programming effort and streamline the workflow for the future.
I too have not dealt with ODF and have no plans to support it in my current project. You might want to check out the OpenOffice.org ODF Toolkit Project.
Good luck and have fun,
- D.
I suggest you to take a look at SimpleXlsBuilder and SimpleXlsSlurper, both are based on apache POI and can fit your basic needs for reading from and writing to Excel 97 spreadsheets in a concise way.
If your spreadsheets are simple enught - without charts and other embedded contents - you should simply convert the spreadsheet to CSV.
Pros:
Both xls and ods will produce the same CSV - You'll have to handle just one input type.
You won't have to mess with new versions of (Open) Office.
Handling plaintext is always more fun than other obscure formats.
Cons:
One that I can think of - finding a reliable converter from xls and odf to csv. Shouldn't be too hard - OpenOffice has a built in one.
A couple things:
1) I agree that using a CSV format can simplify some of the development work. OpenCSV can help with processing CSV files. There are other good CSV parsers for Java out there. Just remember that anything that's available for Java can be used by Groovy due to Groovy's unparalleled integration with Java.
2) I know you said you wanted to avoid handling XML, but Groovy makes XML processing exceedingly simple.