I am writing a Flutter web application that needs to have a customizable template for printing reports: inside the template there will be some placeholders that must be replaced with data at the moment of printing. The "printing" itself will be done by having the user download and open a PDF file, then print it through the browser, the OS or anything else, but that's beyond the scope, at the moment.
The default template would be something like this, where <BUYER_DATA> and <TRANSACTION_DATA> will be replaced with the data of the transaction the user is printing, along with some other "technical" tags (i.e., the page number and the pages count):
Header with site name
727 Chester Rd New Trafford, Stretford
Manchester
<BUYER_DATA>
01-12-2022 14:40
<TRANSACTION_DATA>
AppName - TM 2022
Page <PAGE_NO> of <PAGES_COUNT>
The user is allowed to edit this template in any aspect (boldness, size, colors, etc), provided that the tags related to the data are not removed from it.
So, to achieve this, I added a WYSIWYG html editor inside a page in order to save the template as an HTML-formatted string. And this works fine: only then I realized that the well-known flutter printing library doesn't support conversion from HTML directly to PDF on web, and all my plans began to crumble.
I then tried to discover if there's some other way to achieve the same by replacing the HTML template with something else, like markdown, but it seems that there's nothing that could help me.
The question is: anybody knows of a package capable of converting from HTML, markdown or such, directly into PDF?
I just need to know so I can stop googling around and decide to write my own parser for the HTML and convert it into a series of Widgets of the before-mentioned printing package.
Related
I have created a XML file using R-exams out of just a single exercise to be imported to Moodle. I would like to view it before uploading it in the Moodle question bank. I tried to open it with Firefox and I can see some code but not the output and a message appear saying that the XML file does not seem to have a style sheet associated to it. Is there a way to find this style sheet and to see how the question comes out just using a browser like Firefox or Chrome?
To emulate how the R/exams exercises are converted to HTML by exams2moodle() and how Moodle displays mathematical content, it's best to use
exams2html(..., converter = "pandoc-mathjax")
In recent versions of R/exams the resulting HTML file then automatically loads the MathJax Javascript that enables correct rendering of mathematical content in all modern browsers (including Google Chrome). See also http://www.R-exams.org/tutorials/math/ for some general advice about math in HTML.
To the best of my knowledge there is no tool that would quickly display Moodle XML files in such a way that you can easily assess them.
I have come across a scenario where I have to read html data from database and display it in pdf reports. This html data also contains table structure <table></table> tags and other html element inside it. Previously we used jasper reports for our reporting needs but recently as we came to know that the above functionality is not supported in jasper, I wanted to know which reporting tool can be used so that it can be incorporated with servoy. Does birt provide this functionality?
AFAIK none of the well-known reporting tools does support this, although in BIRT it works "somehow" - but not good enough to be usable.
The reason for this is simple, I think: A reporting tool would have to incorporate a complete browser engine like WebKit or others to achieve this, because it would have to "understand" the structure for its page-breaking algorithm.
Yes, BIRT has a text element where we can set the display type to HTML. If the html table is in a dataset field you will just have to include it in the expression of the text using "value-of" tag, something like this:
<VALUE-OF format="HTML">row["htmlTableField"]</VALUE-OF>
PDF format is taking such html elements into account, including most of simple style settings such background color, text-align, borders etc.
Usually the reports render just fine with html.
There are some tricks to displaying html correctly in BIRT.
You may use a Dynamic Text element and set to html or auto.
Here are some tricks to handling free form text..
Make sure your xml is valid, I recommend replacing line breaks or you may catch a scenario where the rptdocument will not export.
Also, if possible keep these in auto layout, when using run + render. The page breaks may actually be calculated once on run and again on render. You might experience breaking issues with fixed. The page may attempt to display all the html prior to breaking a page when using the RUN() phase, in web viewer or the rptdocument. Then when rendering to pdf the the breaks are applied differently, with fixed layout.
I have been looking around for a while and not found anything useful, also not sure if I have worded the question in the clearest fashion so apologies
I have a section of an app I am building called 'Company News'. The company in question has a news page on their website which displays a title, an excerpt of text and a read more option.
At the minute in the iPhone application I just have a UIWebView which links to that URL, displays an error if no connection is available. However, if my user clicks a story to read the news obviously it opens up a new page, I want to avoid having to build in 'back' and 'forward' buttons and stay away from it looking like a browser within the app.
With that said, I am looking for a way to just extract that data from the website and just display it in my app as raw text. I am not particularly bothered about rich text formatting or anything fancy. I would just like the title and body of text.
Is this possible?
In essence, then, you are looking for an HTML parser.
Assuming the HTML you wish to parse has a predictable format, the approach I would take is to load the HTML via whatever URL loading system you want - e.g. NSURLConnection, ASIHTTPRequest, etc.
Then you will need to parse the raw HTML. I use XPath. It requires that you learn the syntax, but it should work.
For more details about how you might use XPath for parsing HTML, see the second response to this question. You will need to link to libxml2 in your project then use XPath to extract the nodes of interest.
Scraping web pages in this way is fragile, though, because it depends on the structure of a page you don't control and which could be changed unpredictably.
I have a PDF file (softcopy) which was created using iText. Now my company decided to use JasperReports for new release. I need to use that PDF file (softcopy) and need to design JasperReports template and need to populate data.
Do we have any plugin in JasperReports that can convert from PDF to JasperReports JRXML or what do I need to do? Any suggestions?
A PDF is a description of how to render a document on a page. Things
like "draw a vertical line here", "write 'foo bar baz' here in
Courier". It does not contain any information about the format or
organisation of the stuff it is rendering. You won't be able to tell
that you're looking at a table, or a list of bullet points, or a
paragraph, or anything like that.
The PDF format does contain information on a page-by-page basis.
Therefore, page breaks are the one piece of format/organisation
information that you can find.
If you want anything more than a raw stream of completely unformatted,
disorganised text, one per page, you are out of luck. It's virtually
impossible.
from javaranch
You can use http://xmlprinter.com/ and then use a xslt to transform the resulted xml to the desired jrxml.
I'm working in it. If I finish it, i will post the result on github or any other public and open place.
Good Luck
I have a three page Word document that needs to be converted into PDF. This Word document was given to me as a template to show me what the PDF output should look like. I tried converting this document into PDF, created a PDF form and used iTextSharp to open the form, populate it with data and return it back to the client. This is all great but due to large amounts of data stored, the placeholders were insufficient and the text would be truncated or hidden.
My second attempt was to create an MVC 2 View without master page, pass the model to the view, take the HTML representation of the View, pass it over to iTextSharp and render the PDF. The problem here was that iTextSharp failed on some tags (one of them was <hr> tag). I managed to get rid of the problematic tag, but then tables were not rendered properly. Namely, the border attribute was ignored so I ended up with borderless tables. That attempt failed.
I need a suggestion or advice on the most efficient way to create a PDF document in MVC 2 which would be maintainable in the long run. I really don't want my actions to be 200+ lines long. Working directly with the Word document is not the best solution as I have never worked with VSTO so I don't quite know what it would look like to open Word and manipulate text inside of it and add dynamic data and then convert that dynamically into PDF.
Any suggestion is highly welcome.
Best regards!
One thing that I've done in the past is to save the Word file as a DOCX and unzip it since DOCX is just a renamed zip file. Within the archive open up /word/document.xml and you'll see your document. There's a lot of weird XML tags in there but overall you should get a pretty good idea of where your content is. Then just add placeholder text like {FIRST_NAME}, save the file and re-zip.
Then from code you can just perform the same steps, unzipping with something like SharpZipLib or DotNetZip, swapping placeholder copy, re-zipping and then using very simple Word automation to Save-As a PDF.
The other route is to fully utilize iTextSharp and actually write Paragraphs and PdfPTable and everything else. It takes a lot longer to setup but would give you the most control.
Q: you say "... but due to large amounts of data stored, the placeholders were insufficient and the text would be truncated or hidden"
How do you end up having to much data ? If the word template can "hold" the data in 3 pages, they should fit in 3 PDF pages.
I used to use iTextSharp to create my PDF's, but I also almost always ended up building the PDF document from scratch myself.(not really a <200 line solution) Have you considerate another library, I recently switched to MigraDoc's PDFSharp.Way simpler to use then iText, lotsa examples / docus
Just my two cents
Word documents object model is quite easy to understand. It will either contain series of Paragraphs or Tables. Using the Open XML SDK, you can iterate through each paragraph/table in the word document and retrieve it's content and styles. Then you can generate PDF document on the fly using those retrieved information. This will work under MVC too.
But if your word document contains complex elements, then it will take some more time for you to implement based on this approach. Also, this approach would only work with (Word 2007 and 2010) files.
Also, HTML to PDF options currently available in the ITextSharp library would work with only known set of tags, as far as I know.
Another suggestion is to make use of commercially available .NET components. There are lot of good solution available. For ex: Syncfusion