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.
Related
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.
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.
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.
I want to extract text contents from GUI apps,here are 2 examples::
example 1:
Suppose I opened firefox, and input url : www.google.com
how can I extract the string "www.google.com" from firefox using my own app ?
example 2:
open calculator(using gcalctool),then input 1+1
How can I extract the string "1+1" of calculator from my own program?
in brief ,what I want is to find out whether there is a way to extract the text contents from any widget of an GUI application
Thanks
I don't think there's a generic way to do this, at least not a very elegant one.
Some inelegant ideas:
You might be able to modify the X window system or even some toolkit framework to extract what is being displayed in specific window elements as text.
You could take a screenshot and use an OCR library to convert the pixels back into text for the interesting areas.
You could recompile the apps of interest to add some kind of mechanism for asking them questions.
You could use something like xtest to inject events highlighting the region of interest and copying it to the clipboard.
I believe firefox and gcalctool are for examples only and you just want to know in general how to pass output of one application to other application.
There are many ways to do that on Linux, like:
piping
application1 | application2
btw here is the Firefox command line manual if you want to start firefox on Ubuntu with a URL. eg:
firefox "$url"
where $url is a variable whose value can be www.mozilla.org
That sounds difficult. Supposing you're running X11, you can very easily grab a window picture ( see "man xwd"); however there is no easy way to get to the text unless it's selected and therefore copied to the clipboard.
Alternatively, if you only want to capture user input, this is quite easy to do, too, by activation the X11 record extension: put this in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf:
Section "Module"
Load "record"
#Load other modules you need ...
EndSection
though it may prove difficult to use too, see example code for Xorg/X11 record extension fails
I'm using the LaTeX-Beamer class for making presentations. Every once in a while I need to include screenshots. Those graphics are pixel-based, of course. I use includegraphics like this:
\begin{figure}
\includegraphics[width= \paperwidth]{img/analyzer.png}
\end{figure}
or usually something like this:
\begin{figure}
\includegraphics[width= 0.8\linewidth]{img/analyzer.png}
\end{figure}
This leads to pretty bad readibility of the contained text, so I'm asking for your best practices: How would you include screenshots containing text considering, that I will do the output PDF with pdflatex?
EDIT: I suppose I'm looking for something like an 1:1 presetation of the image within beamer. However, [scale = 1.0] doesn't achieve what I'm looking for.
Your best bet is to scale the image outside of Latex for inclusion, and include it in 1:1 ratio. The scaling done by graphics packages in Latex isn't going to be anywhere near as good as possible from other tools. Latex (Tex) has limited floating-point arithmetic capabilities, whereas an external tool can use sophisticated algorithms to get the scaling better.
Another option is to use only a part of the screenshot, the one you want to concentrate on.
Edit: If you can change the font size before taking the screenshot, that's another option—just increase the font size for the screenshots.
Of course, you can combine the two methods.
I have done exactly what you do and e.g defined
\newcommand{\screenshot}[1]{\centerline{%
\includegraphics[height=7.8cm,transparent]{#1}}} % 7.8in
which worked with whatever style I was using at the time. The files included with this macro were all PNGs created with one the usual Linux screen capture tools.
Edit: You may have to play with the size (height and width) of your input files. It came out rather nice for me (and this was from a presentation in 2006).
How about scaling it as follows:
\includegraphics[scale=0.5]{images/myimage.jpg}
This works for me.
Have you tried to convert the image to .eps or .pdf file and use this file in LaTeX?
Maybe try also latex, dvips and ps2pdf.
Problem might be in used viewer, in Linux I use Document viewer or ePDFViewer and output is much worse than in Adobe Reader or Acrobat, which I use in Windows...