The title pretty much says it all: Can angular ui-grid be used with angular material design in a way that follows the material design principles?
It can, but only at a look and feel level. Basically most of the visual elements in ui-grid are over-rideable with templates (cellTemplate, rowTemplate etc). You can also override a lot of the css. So if you're prepared to work through it there's no reason why most of it cannot be tailored.
Be aware that the customize style option on the ui-grid site does not give you the ability to change most of the classes that you will eventually need to in order to make it conform to the material design spec. Additionally it lacks responsive features or the ability to create the kinds of animations/transitions that are a signature of material design.
I really like both projects, its just hard to try and build an app on two frameworks that are currently under active development. I am using ui-grid in my Angular-Material app, but I don't think I would if I had to do it over again
I come from a PHP background and I've used frameworks such as CakePHP and Laravel and it is quite easy to work with layouts and views in all of them.
And the possibility of using PHP inside those template engines provide a way to do things such as:
<?php for($i=0; $i<1000; $i++){ ?>
<td>demo</td>
<? } ?>
Now, starting with Node and express.js I found out template engines seems quite basic here. I've tried hjs, hogan, swig, mustache, handlebars... none of them offers both :
Layout support (templates and views)
A way to do loops like the one I named before.
Am I missing something? Am I asking for too much?
Which one would you recommend me?
A lot of the template engines for Javascript take the philosophical view that it's better to enforce a fairly strict separation between logic and presentation, meaning that the complexity of code/logic allowed in the template is deliberately limited. For a quick overview of this topic, see http://blog.startifact.com/posts/older/the-new-hot-thing-in-web-development-client-side-templating-languages.html (it's about client-side templating, but since it's Javascript, a lot of those same template languages are the ones popular in node.js / Express). This idea of logicless templates exists in the PHP world as well, it's just not as common.
For a more academic treatment of this subject, see this paper: http://www.cs.usfca.edu/~parrt/papers/mvc.templates.pdf. (The author is also the author of a popular template engine for Java called StringTemplate.) The author makes a lot of good points, and in general I agree with the idea of logicless templates, but there are times when it can be inconvenient and I find myself more on the fence about it...see this link for some further considerations. Obviously there are also those who want to be able to anything from a template (as you can in PHP) and believe it's fine to rely on the self-restraint of the programmer not to put too much code in the view, which is where template engines like EJS come in.
Having said all that, it's important to note that what you want to achieve is possible in Handlebars (which is one of the "logicless" languages) and probably many of the others you tried as well. To do it in Handlebars, you'd need to create a custom helper. This might be what you're looking for:
https://www.npmjs.org/package/handlebars-helper-repeat
Example usage:
{{#repeat 10}}
{{> button }}
{{/repeat}}
You could also extend it to be able to support arguments to be able to control the starting number or increment, although that would probably be getting into logic that might be better done in the JS code (according to the Handlebars philosophy) while preparing the data for the template.
With regard to layouts, the closest thing in Handlebars (which is the template engine I'm most familiar with) is partials. This link provides a good introduction to those: http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/handlebars-js-part-2-partials-and-helpers.
Personally I'm a big fan of the template language in an awesome framework (built on Express) called Derby. Its template language is similar to Handlebars, but comes with a couple of handy extensions - just enough to make it a bit more convenient to use without allowing too much logic to creep into the template. Unfortunately I don't think there's a standalone version of it (i.e. you have to use the full Derby framework), but you could create custom helpers in Handlebars to achieve a similar effect.
I'm looking for adequate tool to help with responsive design and, so far, Divshot looks as the best one.
Considering that I plan to use Sass+Compass with Susy grid, I wonder if it's possible to use it in Divshot?
As far as I can see, only {Bootstrap, Foundation, Ratchet} are supported, but I'm asking seeing the following quote:
Here at Divshot we’re huge fans of Sass, a powerful CSS3 preprocessor with attitude. To quickly build our new landing page I took advantage of some nifty mixins I collected from around the web in addition to the myriad of mixins available in Compass.
in this post?
At the moment Divshot supports Compass but not Susy. You can include Compass in your custom stylesheet like you normally would:
#import "compass"
Your CSS is sent over to Alloy, our web API for CSS preprocessors. You can take a look at the gems we're using here: https://github.com/divshot/alloy/blob/master/Gemfile. We'll consider adding Susy in the near future!
Looking for some help on the pros and cons of using UIWebView vs. CGPDF for the purpose of creating an eBook reader app. The content would be in the form of PDF, thus I am trying to figure out which of the two API's - UIWebView or CGPDF would work the best.
I'm targeting features like zoom, table of contents, notes and annotations, and search.
If you are looking for search, annotations, table of contents, etc...you have to use CGPDF*. UIWebView does not contain implementation for those. Even then, CGPDF can be limited somewhat and is generally pretty frustrating :)
On the other hand, UIWebView is obviously much simpler to use.
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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 .