Script for PDF files check - linux

I wanna perform some check for PDF files.
I wish to check the width of pages and also figure out if the file contains double-pages.
Is there any frameworkfor that?
Thanks!
Greetings
Magda

Indeed there is. PDF::API2 looks like it will might you what you need.
It's designed for creation and modification of PDF files. If not, search CPAN for other PDF APIs.

I don't fully understand your question, but for a start check out these utility scripts that come with the CAM-PDF distribution. Look at the lower half of this web page, e.g. getpdfpage.pl.
A lot depends on the complexity of your PDFs, though.

Related

Creating custom documents (PDFs) on the fly on a website

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/

Search through scripts of (multiple) cimplicity screens

We are using Cimplicity to operate some installations at our plant. The frontend consists of a lot of .cim files, which are the screens presented to the operator. These files are built with 'cimedit', which is basically a graphical click and drag program with which you can assemble the screens. Each object you drag onto the screen has the option to run a script, which brings me to my problem.
Because each screen contains a lot of small scripts and functions it is hard to keep track of what does what. For example I'm trying to figure out where a certain table from my database is being accessed or updated. Since the files all seem to be compressed (or so) I can't use a regular 'search the contents of this file' search.
Things I've tried so far are searching using windows, with the content option enabled and also tried the compression option. This had no success. It makes sense because like I said, the files seem to be compressed, so the actual script is not stored in plain text.
So, my question in short:
How do I search all the scripts of (preferably multiple) cimplicity screens?
Any tips on how to search compressed files are also very much appreciated.
I stumbled upon another stackoverflow post while searching for a better windows search tool and ended up finding this post: https://superuser.com/questions/26593/best-way-to-confidently-search-files-and-contents-in-windows-without-using-an
This posts recommends Agent Ransack and it is actually possible to search through the .cim files with this tool.

make swf from fla without ever opening it

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.

How to detemine the file type in Linux?

If someone sends me a document (.pdf,.doc,.xls, ppt, .ogg, mp3, png, etc) without the extension, how can I determine the file type? The /usr/bin/file command doesn't always guess right or it simply says that I have a Microsoft Office document. I would like to know exactly so I can add the extension to the file name.
You can come up with your own rules by adding them to /etc/magic
man file for more details. It is tricky to always get these correct however, I have had reasonable success.
Try mimetype(1).
For Perl, look at File::MimeInfo.
Some of the other posters thus far appear to neglect a few things.
File::MimeInfo uses the same MimeInfo database used by 'file' to identify files. So That's unlikely to do anything different.
File::Type is likely to be interesting though, as it relies only on itself, but this leads to a comically long script full of 'if' statements. But this is, by its very nature, unlikely to cover things 'file' already doesn't cover.
The best you can do with unknown filetypes is try cracking them open with a hex-editor, or running them through 'strings' and seeing if you recognise anything. If you manage how to Identify a file, you may wish to go for File::Type as your solution because as far as I can make out, its at least easy to extend.
You can use the Perl module: File::Type

Tools for displaying text, powerpoint style, in linux

I have a problem where I need a way to display a repeating series of "images" on a computer monitor. Specifically, given a series of text files, I'd like a way to display the contents of said files on a screen in a way much like a powerpoint would.
My current thoughts are to find some tool that will take in a text file of some format, and then output an image which contains the text from the file. Then I'd put it in a directory and have some Slideshow program continuously go between the images in that directory. It's a very hacky solution, obviously.
So, does anyone know of tools that would do such a thing? Or is there a better way to do this? I've looked into the library libgd2, but it doesn't seem to support text-wrapping for images, which is something I'd need.
Thanks!
MagicPoint is a tool for displaying presentations. Presentations are written in a simple plain text file format, much like HTML.
You could easily generate the MagicPoint file automatically and then run it and display the presentation. You can also generate HTML, PS oder PDF from the presentation and display that.
Are you looking for powerpoint equivalent for linux? Openoffice??
have you tried some magic scripting with TeX?
a chain like
tex file | dvi2ps | ps2jpg > output
and define some TeX-Macros?
Showoff's pretty cool. It uses Markdown-formatted slides to create a simple little Sinatra app that you run (with showoff serve), and then view in a browser.
Docutils. See http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/slide-shows.html
The text syntax is reStructuredText
another idea:
text2gif
To complement the suggestions given by others, if you were going to write a program to do this, it would probably be more efficient to just render the text to the screen directly, rather than converting it to images first. It could probably be done using a canvas or text box component in a full-screen window on whatever window manager you are using (e.g. KDE or Gnome).
I give presentations with Opera's #media projection CSS support. On http://talks.webconverger.com/ you can find a template and an example which you can load in Opera's full screen mode and start sliding through.
So besides writing in a familiar language HTML, it's dead easy to share the slides and even get your audience to look at the slides as you're going through them.
If you are looking for something more flashy, there are tools on the Web to generate animations and what not, and again you would simply use a full screen browser to play it back to your audience.

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