I've a text file with content like this:
id, pixelsize, color, text
block1, 200x60, black, Header
block2, 200x180, white, Body
block2, 200x60, black, Footer
Now using actionscript,
I want to generate a psd file which would generate a 3 vertical block graphics (like this) after parsing the given file. All the blocks are placed vertically on top of each other.
Convert this psd file into PDF automatically using the script.
Automate this whole process without opening photoshop. Is it possible?
Please help. Thanks.
You aren't going to be able to create a PSD w/o opening Photoshop. Even when you use something like Adobe Bridge to batch process files from any Adobe app it still uses the appropriate app to open a supported file and perform actions on it.
I have seen apps that allow you to output PDFs from user defined text and variable images (PageFlex comes to mind)...but even then, saving Adobe-compatible files aren't simple tasks to turn off and on (like when you make a text file). There's a lot of data to manage even with PDFs and I'd suspect even more when you look at a PSD file.
Unless you can find an open-source app that somehow allows you mess with its coding so that you can bypass opening it 100% to output a somewhat compatible PSD/PDF file, I don't think you're going to be able to automate much w/o lots of work and some potentially expensive software solutions.
Long answer short, I think you'll have to use Photoshop at some point in your solution. On the upside, you could make a recording of actions in PS so that individual files can be output to whatever format you like...and those I'm sure can be scripted into complicated solutions.
You can do this kind of thing using the ExtendScript Toolkit from Adobe.
Not sure you can do it without having Photoshop open, however.
Given that you want a PDF at the end, could you use something like AlivePDF (ActionScript 3 Open-Source PDF Library)?
If you actually need to also generate a PSD, I'm not sure how you do that from scratch, but the Photoshop SDK would be a good place to start, as well as getting a good understanding of bytearrays.
Related
I am looking for ways to present a PDF file in the browser but make it not downloadable or printable.
If someone really goes through all the trouble to disable the JavaScript library or anything like that, that is fine. This is more for the reason that the content within the PDF will be updated regularly so if you download it it will be out of date by the next day.
I also cannot rely on marking the pdf as protected or encryption as a reasonable way to accomplish this.
If you have any library recommendations or anything else it would be appreciated. I am currently exploring if it is feasible using PDF.js and ViewerJS
I was able to find a solution using ViewerJS and this CSS. The CSS shows a blank page when you try to print (ViewerJS already distorts it to a non-printable state) and ViewerJS prevents you from downloading as a PDF file and instead tries to save as an HTML file.
This meets the requirements of making it just inconvenient enough to discourage users from trying to download the file since the file is always easily accessible on almost any page of the site.
https://gist.github.com/ActuallyConnor/2a80403c7827dd1f78077fb2b5b7e785
I have some graphs on html which takes data from database using php function and javascripts. How can i create daily pdf with graphs on it of current date data without opening webpage and clicking on button?
The key problem is that HTML (graphics or even just text) does not translate directly into PDF. There are some libraries that will do this to a limited degree, but typically without the level of control that most people want in a PDF.
There are two very different ways to go about this, and I have used both at various times:
1 - Create a batch-mode PHP program (or other server-side language of your choice) that creates the graphics entirely server-side (many libraries available for that).
2 - Capture the page as if you were running a browser. I have used PhantomJS http://phantomjs.org/ to do that. The big advantage is that you can make use of all your existing graphics code - even libraries such as d3.
Either way, you will need to take the output and insert into a PDF together with headers, footers, explanatory text, etc. I usually use R&OS http://pdf-php.sourceforge.net/ for the PDF part, but there are other libraries that will work just as well.
try dompdf, it might help you. Here is the link
https://github.com/dompdf/dompdf
I'm building an HTA application in which I need to display a list of file with their associated system icon.
I'm using FileSystemObject to list the file but there seem to have no way to get the icon...
I've found a script in VBS that can save the icon of a file into a .ico .
It read the file (PE resource file, .exe or dll) and parse the icon data.
I modified that script to return the icon's bytes, convert it to base64 and use embed base64 images in HTML.
Here's the original script: http://gilpin.us/IconSiphon/
Issue
) In most case the .ico contains multiple icons (many sizes and color depth) but there's no way I can specify which one to use (as I need 16x16 icons).
) Not all icons are displayed
) Could be slow with many file as it read exe and dll (but I'm ok with that, I can cache already fetched icon)
I've also tried some ActiveX control but none seem to work properly. Even those provided by microsoft (ShellFolderView or ListView) are very buggy.
Requirements
Must display 16x16 icon
Must allow multiple file selection
Everything must be embed in hta (if possible). No external .exe
Does anyone know a way to achieve that?
Thanks!
Use SHGetFileInfo() with the SHGFI_ICON flag.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb762179(v=vs.85).aspx
The filesystemobject will provide you the necessary functions for enumerating files on the local filesystem. However to get the icon image you will need to use the win32 api per #seanchase's response or an external exe.
However you can access the win32api via javascript in the hta using the wshApiToolkit activex object - http://www.google.com/search?q=wshAPIToolkit.ucATO%2F&rls=com.microsoft:en-us&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&startIndex=&startPage=1
Find a copy of that and you're close to being done. It does require distributing the activex object with your code and shell executing the registration process from within the HTA so that might violate your third constraint. Though I believe you can base64 encode the exe into the hta in a dataurl and write that back out to the file system so it would at least be bundled into a single file. If you support that option then maybe embedding an exe that does the same would meet your requriements.
Definitely some hacky stuff that may be unstable on future OS versions - heck I'm not even sure the wshApiToolkit works on windows 7, and 8 is just around the corner. Good luck!
You indicated you're opened to installing ActiveX components and using them in your HTA.
If I had the time, I would approach this for myself by creating ActiveX components using Visual Studio to call FindResource, LoadResource and LockResource. These will enable access to the Group Icon resource for which I would then provide rich interfaces to iterate through the Icons offering the ability to extract BMPs (or PNGs).
This is "how" I would go about achieving this short of actually going off doing it.
Once I build a similar HTA interface and I faced the same problem. I solved the problem by creating a custom icon gallery and converting the images using base64. You may achieve the same by either converting or using sprite. Many UI does it, even java.swing has its own collection embbebed. As you noticed, reading from *.dll can speed down the application
Ideally I wanted to use this in TextMate but I didn't find any feature besides the Show Web Preview which is nice for the fact I can set the interval to update the page, but definitely doesn't work for watching any file and also apply syntax highlighting or any format.
One neat example of what I wanted to achieve is to simulate exactly the same behavior as CoffeScript Try Now feature where you can type in one side and see what the file would look like in javascript.
So ideally I would open my .coffee file and then run coffee --watch on terminal which will track any file change for that specific file, so I could just pop another window inside my text editor which will just keep updating the coffeescript .js generated file.
like this, where the window on the left shows the current file and the window on the right shows the file being watched with specific interval.
I am not sure if I was clear enought, if not, please just let me know..
but basically I just want to see in real time what happens to my files after run a specific script but with syntax highlighting and anything else possible.
I am just testing this kaleidoscope app, it is really nice the way the visualization works, no editing is possible neither syntax highlighting features though but it is really good, so it makes me think that something like this would be really nice:
cheers
Emacs can do both of these things (and you're probably better off running it as a Cocoa app).
ediff works similarly to Kaleidoscope (minus the diagonal lines connecting the two revisions) and does let you edit the files without disturbing the diff process. By default you get the versions above one another but you can press | to toggle to side-by-side and m to expand to the full screen width (unfortunately this doesn't work properly with multiple monitors, at least in the version of Emacs I'm using.)
To tail/auto-revert things, there's auto-revert-mode and auto-revert-tail-mode built into Emacs.
emacswiki.org is pretty good if you're trying to figure out how to do something in Emacs, as is (duh) Stack Overflow. Mastering Emacs is a relatively new blog which has some great articles. There's also M-x all-things-emacs which links to some useful screencasts.
You can open the log file in OSX's Console log viewer utility that is used to monitor system logs. Simple as that. It will not show you diff's but it does emulate the tail -f functionality.
I have an HTML page which has a flash chart(FusionCharts) and HTML table. I need to convert this whole thing into Excel. HTML table should be displayed in cells of excel sheet. Flash chart can be displayed as an image.
Is there any open source API that we could use for achieving this. Could you let me know what are the possible options.
Can this be done by using javascript alone.
The HTML table is relatively easy. You can download the page, parse the HTML (there are various HTML parsing libraries available), extract the table and convert it into CSV (which Excel can load), or directly create an Excel file, e.g. using Java POI, as suggested above.
The Flash part is significantly harder. There are quite a few tools available to capture flash to an image, you'd need to use one of them. This can be tricky, as Flash might be interactive, so you'd possibly have to remote-control the Flash part so it shows the right image before capturing. Hard to tell without more info.
That said, screen-scraping (which is what you're doing) is always labour-intensive and fragile. You should really push for a better interface to get your data from, it will save loads of hassle in the long run.
Just set the content type of the page to "application/vnd.ms-excel". If the html page is just a table it will open with excel and look perfect. You can even add background colors and font styles.
Try some of these content types
application/excel
application/vnd.ms-excel
application/x-excel
application/x-msexcel
Excel can convert HTML tables by default. The easiest way to force it to do this is to save the HTML file with an XLS extension. Excel will then open the XLS as if it were its native workbook.
There's a very good Java POI api that would let you do that, but it's Java.
http://poi.apache.org/
If you're on Win32 you can also use Excel's COM api, there are quite a few tutorials on the net.
I cannot offer any advice on the Flash part, but I have done HTML table to Excel many times. Yes, Excel can open HTML tables but most HTML tables out there have extraneous crap in them that can make it fragile to consistently parse the tables.
CPAN module HTML::TableExtract is a wonderful module that allows you to focus on the non-presentation specific aspects of the table you are trying to extract. Just specify the column headings you are interested in and maybe specify the title or class of the table and you are mostly set. You might have to post process the rows returned a little, but that is considerably easier than dealing with the underlying tag soup in all its glory.
Further, for output to Excel format, stick with Spreadsheet::WriteExcel rather than the OLE interface. That way, you do not depend on having Excel installed for your program to work and things go a little faster.
Make sure you specify the data type of cells if you do not want content to be changed automatically by Excel upon opening the files (another reason I do not like sending around CSV files). Use a configuration file for formatting information so that you can change how the spreadsheet looks without having to change the program.
You can always use Excel's built-in charting facilities to replace the web site graphs.
This combination has enabled me to generate pretty good looking documents comprising several hundreds of megabytes of scraped data (with logos and image links etc) using just a few hundred lines of Perl and a couple of days' work.
What you're trying to do is fragile and difficult to maintain. You should attempt to create a csv feed to fetch the data. All it takes is for someone to come along and modify the HTML and your scraper will throw up on it (probably years after anyone remembers how your program works).
Try to get CSV and image data from the original source (ie, database or whatever) and build the Excel file from that.
I will add to SpliFF's answer that when you have your data as a CSV file you can set the mime type of the page to application/vnd.ms-excel which will open the page in Excel