I have a program that can access a database with a whole bunch of articles.
Due to copyright, I can't access the database straight from my program, but I have a different program that can access it, and it's legitimate to copy small bits from the articles.
Because my friends and I quote a lot from these articles, I thought it would be useful if we could find an add-in for Word that will copy the requested part from an article.
Is there any add-in for Word that would let me use the program that I mentioned above so that I can access the database from within Word?
I would like to program this add-in myself, if possible.
Without further information about which operating system, and version of Word you are using, I can offer only a general outline.
1) It seems to me that you want to make a Word macro using Word Basic, or Visual Basic.
2) When you want to call your program which is external to Word, you need to use the shell command as outlined here from Microsoft's webpage.
I hope that helps you get started writing your macro!
CHEERS
Well its a wrokaround but you can use an automation tool which can run a sequence of actions on a given GUI like Winrunner or TestQuest to semulate the usage of the program, i assume these tools can get an input from a given xml or text file and log outputs in log text file.
If you have the output in a text file you will be able to parse the file using any programmign language and get the information you need and write it to eord or whatever format using OLE objects.
Related
Suppose I have a standard Word document called document.doc.
Inside this document, there are hyperlinks to some server which no longer exists. I wish to replace the link with the aproper one, and since I must do this to many files, I hope there is a way to automate it.
How can I change the hyperlink to something else from outside Microsoft Office? Preferably in a Linux/Unix environment.
I noticed that all the hyperlinks in the document are stored in plaintext and can be viewed by
strings document.doc | grep -i "hyperlink"
I therefore tried a simple sed approach like this to edit in place:
sed -ir 's/www.badlink.com/www.goodlink.com/' document.doc
I then confirmed the hyperlink had changed by calling strings again. However, after using sed, the document cannot be opened by MS Word -- it states the file is corrupted.
So, is there any easy way to edit links in an Microsoft Word document by Linux/Unix tools? In the worst case, I imagine the task can be done with some Microsoft Office macro. And that is okay, too, if it is the only possibility.
DOC is not RTF, you can't edit it with a simple text editor.
you can easily use VBA macro \ some other language using the word Interop libraries - to do this simple search&replace, for more information check
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/f1f367bx.aspx
Now it depends on your needs, if you need to do this on the server side, you can always use OpenOffice or better yet Aspose (commercial licensed 3rd part libraries) to do these things (quite pricey but worth every penny - google them)
If you need to do this on the CLIENT side, and (assuming client uses word, means they are running Windows) you can do it using VBA macro \ Office addin.
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/
Update: It appears that VS doesn't have the hooks needed to do what is needed in my use case. However there are a couple of options that could work for other people and as such I'm marking the question as answered but I would love to find a solution that works for me.
We have encrypted files that are routinely kept in encrypted form within source control (TFS). When I want to compare versions I use Beyond Compare and have added the encryption/decryption tool as filtering on the read/write process to allow plain text viewing and editing.
However if I just want to open the file for reading/editing it's a bit tedious using a dummy comparison just to view/edit the file.
As such as I wondering if there is a configuration setting or way in Visual Studio that would allow me to insert a filter on the read/write so that it could display/edit/save files that would otherwise be unreadable.
Edit:
*NB: The encryption aspect is just single use case *, I'm actually looking for a generic answer that doesn't require writing an editor to replace the editors within VS that already exist such as the MS supplied XML editor or the custom third party ones.
I have both custom and non custom files that are encrypted. Each file type already has an editor. We have no access to the source for any of these editors. The problem is that the file is encrypted in TFS, and all I need is the filtering on the read and write for all files regardless of editor.
I want to use all the existing features of the installed editors without change. Only the reading and writing need to be customised.
Here's a potentially hacky way to achieve what you are trying to do, if there is no other easy option.
TFS stores data in a SQL database. Therefore you can theoretically modify the read/edit command that is used to extract the data from TFS and send it to the editor/viewer. This might involve modifying a stored procedure, or putting a trigger in place to modify the data before it is presented to the editor.
You would need to run a Profiler Trace on the TFS database when you click on edit/view or browse to the node in the source control tree. This will help you to figure out what data TFS is accessing and what functions/stored procs/tables etc it used to extract said data.
The same in reverse; you'd need to modify the 'writing' of the data to use your custom tool before putting it in the DB.
SQL has the ability to call CLR code, so you could use your tool if it's written in .NET.
The easiest way would be to download the 2012 SDK, Microsoft already provide a nice walkthrough on how to implement your custom editor HERE.
The process is:
Install the SDK
Fire up VS2012; Select New Project -> Other Proj Types -> Visual Studio Package
Visual C#, company name, etc...
Tick the "Custom Editor" tickbox
Fill in the rest of the details
So now you're presented with all the source of a vanilla text editor, and the part you want to hook in to is the IPersistFileFormat::Load() and IPersistFileFormat::Save() functions found under EditorPane.cs and put your encryption/decryption routines in there, thus you'll be left with a text editor with a custom encrypted file format.
This may not do what you need, since you need to call third party exe. However this answer may be useful for others that have access to source code (or a dll or library).
You could write a file system filter that encrypts/ decrypts the data to and from disk. Note that the driver sits at the OS level, and is outside of Visual Studio.
From the MSDN article File Systems and File System Filter Drivers:
A file system filter driver intercepts requests targeted at a file system or another file system filter driver. By intercepting the request before it reaches its intended target, the filter driver can extend or replace functionality provided by the original target of the request. Examples of File Systems and File System Filter Drivers include anti-virus filters, backup agents, and encryption products.
See this Code Project article for a tutorial: File System Filter Driver Tutorial. The article does not show how to do encryption/ decryption, but shows how to get a simple driver up and running.
There are extensions that will capture events to the current window save for example and what turns out to be document load. ** This is not a custom editor **
check out the following two links:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd885244.aspx
and a fairly complete open source addin that works with files when saved (regardless of type)
https://bitbucket.org/s_cadwallader/codemaid/src/7cf1bf6108801f48b85e30d85e1646fbc73ba889/CodeMaid/Integration/Events/RunningDocumentTableEventListener.cs?at=default
which hooks the RDT table to extend the current environment. You would need to adjust from here of course but this should get you going in the right direction.
I am looking for a method by which I can print one document, and have a field that is incremented on each copy printed. I currently run linux, so bash in concert with several programs might be the way to go, but I'm just not sure where to start.
I have a document that is used for our business that currently is hand stamped for serialization... We would like to simply print them but cant find a method by which to increment a specific field. I would like to use either a PDF or an ODF/ODT for the document.
Thanks for any help you can give!
How is the document produced at the first place?
If you master that process, you could certainly add serialization at that level. For instance if using LibreOffice you could do that in LibreOffice. If using a text formatter (like LaTeX, Lout, ....) just emit the formatting instructions (e.g. the .tex or .lout source file) with some unique counting (perhaps simpler to do in some scripting language like Python or Ocaml).
Then run the relevant tool to get a .pdf file.
I'm interested in using Office 2007 to convert between the pre-2007 binary formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt) and the new Office Open XML formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx)
How would I do this? I'd like to write a simple command line app that takes in two filenames (input and output) and perhaps the source and/or destination types, and performs the conversion.
Microsoft has a page which gives several examples of writing scripts to "drive" MS Word. One such example shows how to convert from a Word document to HTML. By changing the last parameter to any values listed here, you can get the output in different formats.
The easiest way would be to use Automation thru the Microsoft.Office.Interop. libraries. You can create an instance of a Word application, for example. There are methods attached to the Application object that will allow you to open and close documents, plus pretty much anything else you can accomplish in VBA by recording a macro.
You could also just write the VBA code in your Office application to do roughly the same thing. Both approaches are equally valid, depending on your comfort in programming in C#, VB.NET or VBA.