I'm facing the following situation at moment:
I need to generate a PDF report containing some parameters and graphs. I'm running a C daemon (on Arch Linux, Raspberry PI) which receives the data and should then generate such a report. My first version was using the library libharu and simply painted everything into the PDF.
This actually worked great but it's not a damn good solution, since I have to recompile the whole daemon if I want to change the style of the generated report.
I was thinking about using some kind of template, which I can load by my code and then render into the PDF. Does anyone know a library or something I could use for that?
I'm also open for other good ideas to solve my problem :-)
Related
Problem
I am developing a Rust program which has a GTK3 GUI using the given rust-gtk-binding.
The program should be cross-platform (at least Linux and Windows).
The GUI should be able to show custom plaintexts and small LaTeX-snippets to allow the use math environments (small means sizes of one formula as an element to display).
Therefore, I need a way to convert LaTeX-code into something which can be displayed by the GUI.
Ideas and their problems
I can see two approaches displaying LaTeX:
Compile the LaTeX-source into pdf and then into some image type. It should be possible to use Ghostscript to get the image. But I do not know how to generate the pdf in a way which is lightweight (does not include rather large packages like miktex) and cross-platform. This option could also be overkill as there is no need to dynamically download special packages, a good math support would be sufficient. The positive side is that rendering an image in GTK should be easy.
Use KaTeX which should be sufficient for math environments. I was able to install matching crates and generate HTML source from some formulas. But here it becomes difficult to render the result as GTK has no native way for displaying HTML. As it would be difficult to integrate a HTML-engine into the GUI it would be optimal to find a tool which is able to render HTML to an image type which then can be displayed.
Now I have two ways both using an intermediate step where for common LaTeX the first step is difficult and for KaTeX the second step displays a problem. For both approaches' difficult steps I could not find any feasible solution.
Are there any libraries or similar I could not find or are there any different approaches?
It would be perfectly sufficient to be able to render a single formula, I just want to avoid such massive and difficult overkills like using a complete LaTeX compiler or half a browser to render HTML.
After searching and evaluating many more approaches I got a solution which is kind of good while also having some major drawbacks:
First of all, I use TinyTex as LaTeX environment. I did not restrict the use of LaTeX to e.g. math environments. TinyTex offers support for major platforms while being lightweight and portable. Additional LaTeX packages have to be installed manually which allows me to decide which ones are being shipped with my application.
The negative side is that while TinyTex is lightweight for a LaTeX environment it still is rather big for its purpose here (about 250MB).
I installed the required packages to use \documentclass[preview]{standalone} to get an already cropped pdf.
Afterwards I use Ghostscript to get a png-image for the generated pdf. I did not use language bindings and instead just went std::process::Command.
The following lines should be sufficient to convert test.tex into test.png with the portable TinyTex installation and Ghostscripts gswin64c.exe present in subfolders of the project's directory under Windows: (As TinyTex and Ghostscript also exist for other OS the given example can easily be changed to work on other systems)
use std::process::Command;
fn main() {
let output = Command::new("TinyTex\\bin\\win32\\pdflatex.exe")
.args(&["test.tex"])
.output()
.expect("Some error message 1");
println!("{}", String::from_utf8(output.stdout).unwrap());
let output = Command::new("gs\\gswin64c.exe")
.args(&[
"-dNOPAUSE",
"-dBATCH",
"-sDEVICE=png16m",
"-r1000",
"-sOutputFile=test.png",
"test.pdf",
])
.output()
.expect("Some error message 2");
println!("{}", String::from_utf8(output.stdout).unwrap());
}
Of course this is no particulary good and useful code at this stage but it shows how to proceed with the given problem and I wanted to leave it here in case anyone with a similar problems finds this post.
I have the proper CUPS drivers installed: I can print to my Star TSP143LAN using any application with print capability (like Chrome). I can print to this printer using the node-printer module, by specifying either the printer name or the printer’s network address, and setting the print mode to TEXT.
But I can’t seem to format what I print from NodeJS using the node-printer library. If I set the mode to RAW and send commands as specified in Star’s Command Line Emulator manual for this printer, node-printer will report a successful print but nothing happens. It doesn’t print.
I’m attempting to send these RAW commands because I want to do various formatting operations like make the font larger or bold, and so on.
I’ve tried the node-thermal-printer module but I’ve had no luck.
I’ve been scouring the internet for some help on this issue but I haven’t been able to find much. I’ve seen it mentioned that the TSP143 LAN doesn’t communicate in the same way as other star products and it’s best to use Star’s drivers as a go-between, but I’m not sure what that means. (I thought I might be doing that already when specifying the printer’s class name when attempting to print from node-printer...)
I didn’t have much trouble implementing the Star Swift SDK into an iOS app and doing formatting operations there. But I need to print from a NodeJS environment on Linux. I’m at a loss.
If there’s anybody to whom this sounds familiar and can point me in the right direction I’d be very grateful...
Thanks!
After quite a bit of research, it looks like the Star TSP100/TSP143 LAN is not able to print using Line Mode Commands or ESC/POS from Linux: the solution has been to generate a PDF from HTML (using wkhtmltopdf) and then print the PDF using the node printer library (https://github.com/tojocky/node-printer). I have not yet found a better way to properly format prints.
I want to create custom documents on my website which is running on a Linux-based server. My website has user login capability to access specific details on the website.
What I want to do is:
Use a default .tex file where the contents of the main document are stored. This would be available on the server (on admin side);
Get few user specific inputs (like login name, the day and date when the request was made), their custom inputs like what specific details they want (this will make it possible to include or exclude few chapters, sections from the document);
Using the inputs received above (in point 2), the document would be customized on the fly on the website by running LaTeX compiler and the output of the compilation would be shared with the user.
My questions are:
Has someone tried this before? Any suggestions, alternatives they can point to? If there is any other better solution than LaTeX, I am open to hear and understand that as well.
Are there any specific settings that we need to do either on the server or on LaTeX installation that will enable doing this?
Any additional packages, programs are required to be installed to get this working?
Any help and insights would be appreciated.
You can generate PDF using appropriate libraries for programming language you use for your back-end. This is definitely safer than injecting user input into TeX file and probably would be faster too.
PHP: Best way to create a PDF with PHP
Ruby: https://github.com/prawnpdf/prawn
anything else: google for "$LANGUAGE generate pdf".
The first and the second questions can be done in any programming language you choose while reading the .tex template and add/omit the data, then save it to the temporal .tex file. After compilation yo can remove this file. If you are working with a linux server you can use a service (cron, systemd) to automate the cleaning of files.
To compile and get the file you must use pdflatex command line program, which is the one any LaTeX editor uses. I compile my LaTeX documents this way in linux. I think this way is quite fast, except if you want images in this document, or are using tikz pictures.
I know I am suggesting the old way to do the work, but usually is the best way.
And, finally, I think PHDComics uses something like this for the emergency button (down in the right), only that in the site the pdf is already generated for the specific comic: http://www.phdcomics.com/
is it possible to change text and images in a fla file without ever opening it up and then making the swf via command line? I want to make a flash template and save the fla. Then be able to update my text and image name and convert it to swf. I have one template but tons of different text options and background images. It would be nice to be able to copy the master.fla twenty times and just change the source code (will do this from command line) and then convert to swf (via command line).
Any help would be appreciated.
With CS5, you can do half of what you're asking today, by using the XFL file format instead of FLA. Instead of a binary blob, you get an editable XML file and a tree of separate asset files: PNGs, AS3 files, etc. You can then modify the XML or AS3 files programmatically to get your variants.
(A CS5 FLA file is really just a zipped up version of the XFL, but there's no advantage to using that instead of an XFL. In CS4 and previous, FLA was a proprietary binary format.)
The missing piece is an XFL compiler. Adobe currently provides no such thing, and the third party market hasn't yet produced one.
You could use a systems automation tool to drive the Flash Professional environment through the compilation steps. On OS X, for example, either Automator or AppleScript should be able to do what you want. It'll just have more overhead than the command line compiler you were hoping for.
I agree with Jason, there are a lot of alternatives to what you suggest. Keeping content out of the SWF is good practice actually. This is a good way to avoid large files!
Depending on what you 're looking to achieve, there are a lot of solutions available. XML is an option, JSON another.
If you're looking to build a template, any of the above would seem appropriate.
It sounds like you're working from the Flash IDE, as Jason suggests you may want to have a look at another IDE, such as FlashDevelop, FDT or FlashBuilder as they make coding with AS3 a lot easier.
The question probably sounds a little odd, but the actual task is relatively simple, I swear!
I'm automatically generating some PDFs from a webform, using PDFCreator to merge a generated FDF into a preexisting PDF. I created the preexisting PDF in NitroPDF. This setup works great - almost. The problem is that when you view the generated PDFs in Adobe Reader 9 (the most common reader) a subset of the fields are just blank. The information is still there; using previous versions of Adobe Reader or a different reader like Foxit Reader shows the entire PDF. No clue what's going on, and Adobe tech support was useless since I didn't create the PDF with Adobe software. (If you'd like to help fix this problem instead of the following, feel free to email me.)
However, if I take the resultant PDF and print it to a fresh PDF using a PDF printer driver, it works great everywhere. This is time-consuming and annoying for our sales department to do themselves, so I want to perform this step automagically upon creating the first PDF.
I'm in ubuntu, and have command-line root access to the server. The program is written in PHP, and can easily make system calls. I'm just having trouble figuring out how to tie things together properly so that I can automatically print a known file using a specific printer driver to another known file.
You could try putting your PDF files through Ghostscript. I have found that this is enough to fix many problematic PDFs.
gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf
(The same command can also be used to merge several PDF files into one, just specify multiple input files.)