According to Microsoft ("Image Analysis" in https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-SharePoint-Blog/Enrich-your-SharePoint-Content-with-Intelligence-and-Automation/ba-p/194174, from May 21, 2018), we should be able to search for text within images.
Is this working for you/anyone? If so, I would like to know what you had to do to get it to work.
I have a SharePoint modern team site with PNG images that contain clearly readable text...but search will not find anything. I have requested re-indexing.
I have had a Microsoft Support request (#10638094) open since June 27 with this question/issue, and no one--even after escalation--has been able to answer it.
Based on the article above, it appears that "MediaService" column(s) should be added to the library to support this; however, I can find no such columns in the environment (using PnP export to review).
Naomi Moneypenny and Kathrine Hammervold highlighted this functionality at Ignite 2017 (https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/Microsoft-Ignite-Orlando-2017/BRK2181, about 27:00), but it doesn't seem to be available/working (at least not for me).
August 24: So, after research, digging yet further, I have an escalated support ticket at Microsoft (#10638094, unsolved) and there are conversations at https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Intelligent-Search-Discovery/Search-for-words-in-your-images-in-Office-365/ba-p/135703, https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-SharePoint-Blog/Enrich-your-SharePoint-Content-with-Intelligence-and-Automation/bc-p/236625, and Does Office 365 image search work? If so, how?. I have yet to hear of this functionality working for anyone. I will keep digging, and I will certainly post if I hear anything. J
After some digging, from official it seems already released at the end of 2017. However there is no any related doc or official guide to this Text in image search function.
The 2 way i can think of perform text in image search.
Perform OCR yourself on the image before uploading the image and embed the text in image metadata.
Use support image type like IIRC and TIF that image are recognized.
In your case, you can upload the image and have another column that contains text and apply metadata to the image in a list/ library column.
OneDrive in another hand also has this function. For example, search for things like "cat" and it * should* pull up most pictures you have of cats. Its more likely using tag as label for the image instead of reading the picture it self.
Also, i believe OneNote has its index recognizable text and handwriting. Maybe this can point you to the right directions.
*Microsoft Azure's computer Vision offer service to recognized text in image. Maybe this can help.
"Is this working for you/anyone?" Yes, I responded to this post elsewhere and see it posted here, as well. Unfortunately, I cannot tell you HOW to get it to work or to verify that it is correctly configured. I can only suggest a test for you to see if it is working for you, as it works for me. I have not tested every way in which it could or should work. I have only discovered it working with PNGs I inserted into Wiki Pages in SharePoint Online. Those PNGs are generated using Snag-It to take Screen Captures and I do not see where Snag-It would be doing any OCR on the image to embed anything, etc. OCR is not even in the Snag-It help file, so I believe the PNG files are just simple PNGs. I insert them into the SharePoint Wiki page, which uploads them to the Site Assets library. And, when I search for a word in the image, the image is returned as a result - not the Wiki page. So, suggest you try a simple test of just inserting a PNG with text in it into a Wiki Page and give the index a bit of time to run to see if it works for you.
It seems like the functionality has matured recently. I have been testing it more thoroughly, and I have documented the results in my blog at http://www.collaboration-foundry.com/SharePointImageAnalysis.
Bottom line: It works for me in OneDrive and SharePoint (modern and classis), but I've only seen it work on the out-of-the-box Document content type--which limits custom solutions somewhat.
It's cool functionality when it works. Looking forward to seeing Microsoft build on this.
John
Sorry, this is a bad question. I don't even know what the title should be. I'm a total noob at making websites so this might be easy to find but I just don't know the terminology to search for. I cannot find anything about how to do this...
What I want to do is have something like references/variables that I can use in a block of text and it will automatically get replaced with whatever value should be there. Best way I can think of to describe it would be if I was using the site as a design doc for a game or something, I would be able to type in [Title] or something similar on any page and when it loads that text would be replaced with whatever my Title is. That way If I ever change titles, names, classes, races, places, items, etc... they would only have to be changed in 1 place and the change would be reflected everywhere.
I notice if I add a link to a page it will automatically use the Title of that page as the text of the link. That is almost exactly what I want. Except when I change the Title of the other page the text of the link remains as the original text. It doesn't get updated to the new Title and that is not at all what I want.
Also, I want to do this in Google Sites and as simply as possible. I don't really want to use a database. I was hoping Google Sites would have some kind of funcionality for this.
I don't believe this is possible (on Google Sites) and likely you need to consider a hosted solution.
Quoting the answer from this relevant post:
You should consider hosting your solution using Google's App Engine
instead of Google Sites. You can set it up so it uses PHP (see link
below), you can configure it to use your domain name and you get
enough CPU, disk and bandwidth allowance to serve around five million
page views for free each month, if you are serving more than that,
their prices are extremely competitive.
Google App Engine:
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/whatisgoogleappengine.html How
to setup PHP using Google App Engine: http://blog.caucho.com/?p=187
Also I'm not sure how your PHP skills are but if you're unfamiliar with it then this should help to get you started.
for my job, I'm looking into an idea in which people would use Google Search by Image and use any celebrity photo they find. Google would return the results and then on our end, a there'd be a database of professionals showing how to get that specific look.
I'm assuming this is extremely unlikely to do, based on that users could use ANY photo.
So, is there a way that I could have about 100 or so celebrity photos that Google Image results could compare to and then choose the one that is closest.
Basically:
Drag drop photo of Britney Spears
Google searches with that image
Google's results compare the top images with our 100, and selects the closest match.
User gets to see video of how to get Britney Spears look.
I'm not a programmer, but looking for some API or Search by Image extension that could make this remotely possible for the programmers here at my job. Does something like that (a search by image api) exist? The best I could find was just the support page, which is hardly of any help: http://support.google.com/images/bin/answer.py?hl=en&p=searchbyimagepage&answer=1325808
You can easily search by an existing image by inserting this into your address bar:
https://www.google.com/searchbyimage?site=search&sa=X&image_url=YOUR_IMAGE_URL
Example:
https://www.google.com/searchbyimage?site=search&sa=X&image_url=http://cdn.sstatic.net/Sites/stackoverflow/company/img/logos/so/so-icon.png
Sorry to say, but the Google image API is deprecated:
Important: The Google Image Search API has been officially deprecated as of May 26, 2011. It will continue to work as per our deprecation policy, but the number of requests you may make per day may be limited.
Quite sure there are some alternatives (http://www.tineye.com/ and http://mrisa.mage.me.uk)
Update (2013): There is now Google Custom Search which allows image searches.
These answers are quite obsolete, but the question comes up in searches. So, the Google Vision API has the "web detection" feature that does a reverse image search. First 1000 requests per month are free, $3.50/1000 afterwards.
I think Google Web Detection could be a solution for you. Google moved it permanently from Image search
You can do it via www.images.google.com but only from a browser (lets you upload your own image and compares it to similar).
I'm working on doing it from code (not from browser).
I had the same problem and came up with two solutions:
There are a number of APIs that give reverse image search results nowadays. The ones I used are https://reverseimageapi.com and TinEye.com.
As the selected answer mentions, you can easily scrape this information but will almost certainly need rotating proxies to prevent being banned by the search engine. There are plenty of proxy rotation services (Zyte, Oxylabs, ScrapingBee, etc.) to make you life easier.
I ended up going with option 1 due to the upkeep of scraping search engines and elements changing / breaking.
I have a list of books listed by their titles in a text file. I want to write a script which can use a web service like Google scholar or amazon to search for the books and return me a xml or bibtex file with citation info for each book.
Which programming tools can I use for this kind of automated search ?
Python would be my recommendation.
Get names from the text file, simple file reading
Construct a REST URL request to google's book API
http://books.google.com/books/feeds/volumes?q=Elizabeth+Bennet&start-index=21&max-results=10
Simple python code to get data from this URL (may need an API key, would advise using urllib2 with error handling rather than urllib)
Sample code,
import urllib
url = 'http://foo.api.request'
data = urllib.urlopen(url).read()
See the return schemas for this API (you can use the XML however you like).
See BibTeXML for conversion between the two formats.
HTH
I think it could be useful if you specify what kind of script you want to write!
Anyway... you could do some low level work and write your own HttpRequest for google and amazon or you could just rely on their API for example: http://code.google.com/apis/books/
There is a great project which does something similar what you want to do, it's called Shelves. It's written for Android but should give you some ideas how to handle your requests. Instead of downloading some citations it's downloading the cover.
http://code.google.com/p/shelves/
Just as a quick side note, saving your books in a xml file could be an option as well. In some cases it makes parsing them easier.
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Our company is looking to integrate invoices into a new system we are developing.
We require a solution to create a layout of the invoice and then convert to pdf.
We have considered just laying out the invoice in html/css then converting to pdf.
We have also considered using SVG->PDf conversion.
Both of these solutions integrate well into our existing templating language used for our web application.
Historically we have been a Microsoft based business and used Crystal Reports for such a task but we are looking for an open source Linux solution for this project.
Does any one have any suggestions of an approach or technology we could use for such a task?
Try this... create a blank invoice with Word (or whatever you want) and save it as a PDF.
Then use a PDF library to modify the PDF (insert the text at particular coordinates). We do this in the Microsoft world and it is extremely easy.
The biggest benefit is that we can use our own tools to create and modify the template. If we want to add some static text, we just crank open Word, make the change and save it to a PDF file (that is being used as a template).
For Microsoft, we use iTextSharp which is actually a C# port of the original Java version of iText
Additionally...
You can use Adobe Acrobat to insert fields in the PDF (address, phone, invoice number, line item 1, line item 2, etc...) and then use iText/iTextSharp to populate these fields at run time.
This is, in more detail, what we do... and it is extremely easy.
The normal way is to install (La)TeX (probably already on the linux box) and run pdflatex to get the pdfs. You can also use Apache FOP, if you prefer xslt and xsl-fo.
If the number of invoices to create is low you might want to use open-office (directly or as a toolkit).
If you want high-precision positioning and low-level access, a low-level pdf library (I don't know if iTextSharp works with mono) might be what you want.
I would try out LaTeX first, because it allows you to get results with the least effort.
I've previously produced invoices by templating a PostScript file, and then using Ghostscript's ps2pdf to convert those into PDFs.
We use Reportlab with Python. If you look around there are a load of ready-made forms/invoices/etc.
There are several OSS reporting engines (Jasper Reports, Pentaho and BIRT to name three) that you could use in much the same way as you have historically used Crystal Reports. One of the other posters mentions ReportLab, which is an option if you're using Python or can embed a Python runtime in your application.
Probably the most flexible solution is to create XMLs with invoice data and then by using XSLTs transform the, into PDFs, HTMls, whatever...
It depends on your environment. If you have access to Java, you might look at iText (http://www.lowagie.com/iText/), a library that allows you to generate PDF files on the fly.
There are two steps, if i understood correctly:
1) Creation of PDF template with placeholders to populate data programmatically
2) Populating the PDF template programmatically during run time
For #1, OpenOffice allows creation of PDF templates, which can then be populated programmatically. It's good enough to create simple invoices that doesn't probably involve datagrid/table kind of stuff.
For #2, you already have the answers here - iText, iTextSharp.
Hope this helps!
I love wkhtmltopdf http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/
Not sure what your goal is here, but there is an opensource php-library called fpdf, which also has an extension for taking a pre-made pdf as layout and then populate it with more content, generating a new PDF with that info.
However, I would go for a solution that you can integrate nicely into the plattform you're building, but I wouldn't go in a HTML->PDF solution since you won't have any clue about what would fit on a piece of paper regarding sizes in that kind of enviroment, meaning you won't know when you should split the content into two separate templates.
You might also try using XSL:FO. XSL:FO is a documented standard for describing page layout: http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl/#fo-section.
I've had success on two projects creating documents by creating an XML schema that defines the content of the "PDF". I then use the XSD tool (from Microsoft) to generate a class representing this document. I then map my data into that structure, serialize the populated class to XML, along with an XSL stylesheet that defines how that data should be mapped into FO, and pass it to an FO formatter. For formatters, I have use Alt-Soft's Xml2Pdf with success. There are a few others out there. There are some tools available to help create the XSL to FO stylesheet (i.e. stylusstudio and XmlSpy), but I recommend learning the FO constructs as the tools seem to produce bloated stylesheets. FO is comparable to HTML (where a P tag is a BLOCK tag in FO), but can be tricky. This nice thing about FO, is that some formatter support conversion to other formats, such as Word, HTML, etc.
Other options:
iTextSharp (C# port of iText). Just started reading about this. Open source and free. I don't think there is any "templating" supported with this, but I could be wrong about that.
SQL Server Reporting Services. Assuming your invoice data is in, or can be put in, a format that can be read by reporting services (SQL Server, Web Service, etc), define the layout in SSRS and then publish to reporting server. Use SSRS Web Services or query parameter execution to execute the report and have it output as PDF.
This html-2-pdf site may be a helpful starting point: http://maarten.lippmann.us/?p=101
A site a friend of mine built uses a script to churn HTML pages into printable PDFs, too - http://philambdaupsilon.org. Not sure on the exact details of it, but he is an SO user, and I'll send this question to him, too.
Unfortunately, the best system on the market (at present) is passing the HTML & CSS to a ColdFusion server and have that return the rendered PDF. So if money isn't a big concern, this is the quickest to deploy solution that'll render the best results.
I've tried very hard to get FPDF, TCPDF, the R&OS pdf class, and even CodeIgniter's recommendation to work, but nothing with stable output for anything beyond the most basic/bland HTML files.
Honestly, if the ColdFusion solution isn't viable, I'd use html2ps, and then ps2pdf to convert your files into a PDF.
(This is all assuming that you don't want to take the time and design each PDF using the native PDF-creator code in PHP. This is what systems like SugarCRM use. Though its very functional with stable results, the actual creation of each PDF-generator file is a most painful process)
We have used Jasper Reports before. It's not what you'd call user-friendly, but it will talk directly to your database.
html2pdf works very well. You can use this to generate both HTML and PDF reports from the same source.
I'm fiddling with Black Sheep Invoices right now, which is great at first but now I'm having trouble actually getting it to render the PDFs. Lots of installation difficulties--probably a lot easier on your own server but i'm up on a shared host with it. The HTML output and data management portions are well done though, which is something you won't get out of just creating a postscript template. I was hoping to find a reference to a library that has an active development team though (Black Sheep is not being updated at this time).
If you want browser perfect HTML converted to PDF then try commandlineprint
You'll need to install firefox on a linux distro, disable all firefox alerts and then run it through a virtual display. Check this thread for more details.
It's infuriating to get running well but does give you the best results for HTML to PDF conversion I've seen.
OK, a search of Google Code projects turned up Simple Invoices, which is awesome and well maintained.
I use TROFF for my invoices because of its extremely simple textual encoding. The logic is a few lines of Perl. Keeping it simple.
For a Ruby solution, try Prawn: http://prawn.majesticseacreature.com/
I use open office on the server and then generate the XML for the document (just unzip the document and hack away)
Some can use Dhek template editor to define area/placeholder for existing PDF, without altering existing document, and then populate it to generate final doc (e.g. with user values from a form): https://github.com/applicius/dhek .