Consider an online book or paper with some whiz-bang FORTRAN code listings you want to copy over as input to a FORTRAN compiler. In MS/WINDOWS I can use ctrl-a to put that text in a buffer. Now I want to save that text in a form that is compatible with FORTRAN formats. If I just blithely paste it in an MS Word file, or a .txt file, I am concerned that the formats will get all screwed up (e.g., hidden formatting characters might be inserted) and not be compatible with what a FORTRAN compiler likes to see. What is the safest way to download the text from the buffer to ensure compatibility later on? I seem to remember that the old DOS O/S provided a way to do this.
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I am looking for a way to convert or save a text file in the UCS-2 LE format; specifically without BOM...i guess.
I have zero knowledge what any of that means actually; but i know i need that because of this wiki page on what i am trying to accomplish: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Closed_Captions
in other words:
this is for a specific game engine, "Source Engine," which requires the format in order to compile in-game closed captions for sounds.
I have tried saving the file in Notepad++ using the "UCS-2 LE BOM" option under the encoding menu...there is no option for just "UCS-2 LE" however, and because of this, the captions cannot be compiled for the game engine. I need to save without BOM, "I guess" (because again I don't know what I'm talking about and I assume based on logical conclusions, that I need to not have BOM, whatever that actually means.)
I would like to know about a way to either save a txt file in that encoding format; or a way to convert one.
In my specific case; it appears that my problem boils down to "the program is weird."
what I mean by this is, notepad++ actually does save in the correct format; but I failed to realize that because of a quirk in the caption compiler where it only works if you drag the file onto it; not via command line as previously thought.
I will accept this as the answer when i am allowed to in 2 days.
I've used a linux function to convert a list of PDF files to text.
Command:
pdftotext -htmlmeta
This work well for most of my files.
but for a small amount of them, this return me a blank text file.
My unsuccesssfull pdf files were not encrypted, not securised by user / password and they were not read only.
Converting PDFs to text is not a well-defined process. It can work awesome or not at all, depending on the PDF input.
Why is this? Because a PDF's task is mainly to represent the optics of a document, not the textual contents. PDFs can be everything from a pure text with positional information up to a pure graphics of the glyphs of the letters of the text. In the latter case one would need to run an OCR on the input in order to receive text information. This is not done by tools like pdftotext.
Sometimes the text in the PDF is scattered throughout the file, e. g. because first all standard-font letters are mentioned in the PDF, then, later in the file, all the italics-font letters are mentioned (of course with positional information, so a reader of the optical representation won't notice this, even if standard and italics are mixed throughout the text on the page). To rearrange this mess to a fluent text is a major task not very many converters are capable of.
So I guess all you can do is try some more converters for PDF to text (some are better than others, and some are better just for some specific input) or see that you can get the text from another source than the PDF files.
I'm a college student majoring in CS, and that means I spend a lot of time poking around in vim. I'm still a complete noob, but I love editing text in the terminal--it's more fun than writing documents has any right to be.
However, I'm curious if there's a basic, low-frills document format I can use (from within vim) to typeset my homework assignments. I'm familiar enough with LaTeX, and if it were possible I'd use it for everything, but it has two main disadvantages:
It takes a long time to write an entire LaTeX document, and
LaTeX doesn't handle code very well.
With that in mind, I'd like to know if some format exists which addresses both these needs and is still easy to hash out quickly from a terminal-based text editor. I use vim for literally everything else I write, so the need to keep LibreOffice Writer around just for homeworks seems a bit overbearing to me.
Thanks!
I would tend towards something light like Markdown, but the needed capabilities depend on what requirements you have for the output (formatting and styling).
I find the AsciiDoc project quite interesting. From their website:
AsciiDoc is a text document format for writing notes, documentation,
articles, books, ebooks, slideshows, web pages, blogs and UNIX man
pages. AsciiDoc files can be translated to many formats including
HTML, PDF, EPUB, man page. AsciiDoc is highly configurable: both the
AsciiDoc source file syntax and the backend output markups (which can
be almost any type of SGML/XML markup) can be customized and extended
by the user.
It even comes with a Vim syntax.
I'm trying to convert this delimited PDF to an excel (or some other delimited format). Using Adobe Acrobat 9, I attempt to save it and copy it) as Excel but it gives the error message "BAD PDF; error in processing fonts. [348]".
I'm open to any solution that will create a delimited file, ranging from using Adobe Acrobat, to programming to using other apps. The only limitation is that I don't have a budget to buy anything (such as Able2Extract).
The way I was able to export my images and fonts without buying any extra software to do the conversion was this way. go to Advanced, PDG Optimizer, select all of the options you want on the LEFT COLUMN and where it says MAKE COMPATIBLE WITH select Acrobat 8.0 and later, OK....you are in your road to success
Note: not really an answer, but some suggestions.
Sounds to me that Crystal Reports is not following the PDF spec close enough.
I'd make sure CR is fully updated/patched and try genning another file making sure that "tagging" is enabled - tagging defines the layout structure. I don't have a copy of CR handy, but you may have to define a distiller template to use so when you print to PDF you can select that job option.
You can also tell its a bad PDF by using Preflight in Acrobat, it says there is no tag structure and you can do it manually (draw boxes around each item...). Also that there is no language set, and it is somehow compatible with Acrobat 1.3? which isn't supported anymore and should be 4 at the lowest?
Once you have a "good" pdf can export to xml/word and import that to excel. Also, with Acrobat 8+ you can highlight using the select tool, right-click and choose Open As SpreadSheet. You might be able to get away with just highlighting the whole document -- though I'd hope the xml approach would be best.
Able2Extract does some OCRing and tricky fuzzy logic not only to define tags/layout so it is exportable, but also avoids any font, encoding, etc issue - at least to my knowledge.
In the rare case that you can't get a new file, then exporting to plain text/accessible seems to generate a nice flat text file. You could write a vbscript to parse it (adding your delimiter) and import that into excel.
I want to use a algorithm to reduce memory used to save the particular text file.I don't really know how text is stored but i have an idea in mind.
Would it be better to extend a open source text editor (if yes than which one) or write a text editor myself.
It would be nice if someone could also give me a link or tutorial to some basics on how text editors work and the way data is stored.
Edited to add
To clarify, what I wanted to do is instead of saving duplicates of a word make a hash table and store the address where it needs to be placed.
That way I wouldn't be storing the duplicates.
This would have become specific to a particular text editor.
Update
thanks everyone I got what all of you'll are trying to say. Anyways all i wanted to do is instead of saving duplicates of a word make a hash table and store the address where it needs to be placed.
This was i wouldn't be storing the duplicates.
Yes and this would have become specific to a particular text editor. never realized that.
I want to use a algorithm to reduce memory used to save the particular text file
If you did this you would no longer have a text editor, but instead you would have created some sort of binary file editor.
The whole point of the text file format is that it is universal, meaning any text file can be open in any other text editor.
Emacs handles compression transparently. Just create a text file with .gz extension. Emacs will automatically compress contents of the file during save operation, and decompress when you open the file next time.
Text is basically stored as-is. i.e., every character takes up a byte or two (wide chars), and there is no conversion done on it when it's saved. It might add an end-of-file character or something though. Don't try coming up with your own algorithm to compress these files. That's why zip-files and other archives were created. They're really good at compressing text. If you wanted to add these feature to your text-editor, you'd have to add some sort of post-save hook to zip it, and then put a hook on the open command to unzip it. Unless you wanted to do it by hand every time. Don't try writing the text editor yourself from scratch, unless (maybe) you're writing notepad. Text editors with syntax highlighting aren't very easy to make, even with the proper libraries. I'd say write a plugin for something like Visual Studio or what have you. Or find an open-source text editor.