I sometimes use VSCode for a Delphi 7 project because I like VSCode's git functionality and for a few other reasons (superior string search, diff, etc).
Delphi 7 is a pain, and to get it to consistently compile I need to convert the dfm files to their binary version (all 2300 of them). This of course makes them unviewable in the diff viewer, or to just open the file?
Is there a setting where if I open that file, it will first pass it through the convert.exe (that's its actual name) util so that it can be viewed as a text? I understand that this might be read-only, which would be sufficient to my needs (though if on save it could just pass it back through, that'd be great too).
I'm having trouble figuring out what exactly to to search for on Google (the keywords seem too generic), but I can imagine some generalized functionality that would work for other environments beyond just Delphi/pascal.
Related
I'd like to merge at least 2 PDF files into one while preserving all the form elements in the original PDFs. The form elements include text fields, radio buttons, check boxes, drop down menus and others. Please have a look at this sample PDF file with forms:
http://foersom.com/net/HowTo/data/OoPdfFormExample.pdf
Now try to merge it with any other arbitrary PDF file.
Can you do it?
EDIT: As for the implementation, I'd ideally prefer a command line solution on a linux plattform using open source tools such as 'ghostscript', or any other tool that you think is appropriate to solve this task.
Of course, everybody is welcome to supply any working solution to this problem, including a coded solution that involves writing a script which makes some API calls to a pdf-processing library. However, I'd suggest to take the path of least resistance first (CMD Solution).
Best Regards
EDIT #2: Well there are indeed several CMD tools that merge PDFs. However, these tools don't seem to, AFAIK, to preserve the forms in the original PDFs! These tools appear to simply just concatenate the printouts of all those PDFs into a single Printout, which is then presented as a single PDF.
Furthermore, If you printout a PDF file with forms into a file, you lose all the forms in it. This clearly not what I'm looking for.
I have found success using pdftk, which is an open-source software that runs on linux and can be called from your terminal.
To concatenate multiple pdfs into one (and preserve form-fillable elements), you can use the following command:
pdftk input1.pdf input2.pdf cat output output-file.pdf
Is there any way to get current document encoding (that is in the bottom bar) in my extension code?
Something like vscode.window.activeTextEditor.encoding
This does not appear to be possible.
Since it's nearly impossible to prove a negative, the rest of this answer documents what I explored.
The string "encoding" does not appear (in this sense) anywhere in the API docs nor in the index.d.ts file it is derived from. (With VSCode 1.37.1, current as of writing.)
I dug into the vscode sources to see if there might be a clever solution, but came up empty. The code that executes when the encoding is changed by the user is in editorStatus.ts, class ChangeEncodingAction. This makes its way to textFileEditorModel.ts, function updatePreferredEncoding, which sets preferredEncoding. That field controls what happens when the file is saved, and is used to populate the status indicator, but doesn't go anywhere else I can find.
Reading the status indicator itself does not appear possible since the API allows extensions to create new indicators with window.createStatusBarItem but not enumerate existing ones. And directly accessing the DOM is not possible.
I also came up empty searching through VSCode issues related to encoding, both open and closed, but only skimmed the most recent ~100 closed issue titles.
Alternatives
My main suggestion at this point would be to file an enhancement request on the VSCode github.
It should also be possible to do something with reflection but of course it would be fragile.
Finally, the encoding controls how the document in memory (a sequence of characters) maps to a file on disk (a sequence of bytes). Depending on what you're trying to do, it might work to speculatively encode the document in several encodings and compare each to what is on disk (so long as the file is not dirty).
What are people using in vfp 9 for a replacement for the built-in scctext.prg that translates binary files in vfp to a textual representation?
We’ve moving an existing project that’s in vfp 9 sp1 into tfs source control, but we need a way to make sure that the non-textual files are able to get the benefits of comparison that only non-binary text files allow. We plan to check both the textual representation and the binary file into source control (the binary is more for the “just in case” scenario)
According to the document at
http://www.ita-software.com/papers/Borup_Mercurial_Published.pdf
there are at least three options for converting .scx, .frx, .lbx, .prj and other non-prg dbf files in visual foxpro (vfp) to a textual representation. Only some of them allow for converting the textual information back to binary - not sure how often we’d really use that or not.
ALTERNATE SCCTEXT
This one seems older with latest version in 2009 - not sure if it’s still the preferred tool - and it seems to have no way to take the textual representation and convert it back to a binary file.
http://vfpx.codeplex.com/releases/view/12955
TWOFOX
This one seems similar to the foxbin2prg except it creates xml files - seems like only one dev is working on it unlike the others that are open to contributions from others so not sure how current it is and how much it’s being used by other developers - it does have two way conversion like fox2binprg has.
http://www.foxpert.com/downloads.htm
FOXBIN2PRG
This one is fairly recent - but not sure if it’s production ready enough to use for prod coding working - it does have two way conversion
http://vfpx.codeplex.com/releases/view/116407
TRIGGER INVOKE ONE OF THE ABOVE ON CHANGE OF BINARY FILES IN VFP IDE
What are people using to invoke these textual representation options?
I’ve seen this class that was created to run one of the programs listed above for all files in the project. Apparently it does it when the date time of the last generate is older that the date time on the textual version of the file. One detriment I’ve read is that it generates for foundation classes and other things that really are not items that a dev is working on (code that is referenced by but not included in your project).
http://codepaste.net/9yy1gm
Thanks for any advice from those that are using vfp 9 with source control out there!
You should check out the scX library written by Paul McNett which is published on Ed Leafe's web site. I haven't used it in a mission-critical software project yet, but I have tested it out. It seemed to catch all the potential problems I've encountered with other scctext replacements.
The reason I haven't used it in a big project for a couple of reasons.
It is a breaking change for source control history. So, comparing source code in your current SCA or VCA files with the new files generated by scX isn't going to be simple.
It isn't a drop in replacement for scctext. Instead of checking files into and out of source control directly from the IDE, you'll have an intermediary folder.
You'll check your files out of source control into one folder, convert them to FoxPro format, and then edit them in the FoxPro IDE.
Then, you'll save your changes in the FoxPro IDE, convert them to scX format, and then check them into source control.
I'm sure much of #2 can be automated; but combined with #1, making the change to scX wasn't worth it for me.
FoxBin2Prg is Production ready, and AFAIK, it's the only tool that allow Diff and Merge of the generated text (tx2) files, and can regenerate the binaries from them.
The generated files are PRG style, so developers can see them as modifying a PRG (with PROc/ENDPROC structures and such), but they aren't mean to compile. Primary use is for SCM tools, but can be used seperately.
I'm actually using on production code with a 10 member team using concurrent modifications on forms and classes.
Some documentation is available on VFPx in English and Spanish, Internal messages are vailable on both languages and from version v1.19.24 a new translation to German is available too.
More info on VFPx site,
Best regards!
I have recently started a new job as a Business Systemd Analyst. The company has an in-house document management system that reads/parses RTF documents that have a BBCode-like syntax to do basic conditional, looping and inserting of data from a database; my role is to modify these RTF files with the code blocks to make them dynamic.
For my own personal use I would like to utilize a version control system to better handle revisions and so I don't have to have dozens of copies of a file during the various stages I'm working on them, probably Mercurial (I don't feel like dealing with Cygwin), but seeing as I'm more used to source code in an IDE than a rich text document template, I'm not quite sure if a VCS system is even the appropriate solution to use as I couldn't really use them to diff files, just as storage and tracking.
Any suggestions for this? Could I get by with a VCS system or am I applying programmer logic to a non-programming problem? :)
seeing as I'm more used to source code in an IDE than a rich text
document template
It is a look at a strange angle: you can version all, always, anytime. Just sometimes it's less usable, sometimes - more.
If your files are basically text - you can version/compare/rollback, if your files are readable by special viewers texts - you can also diff revisons, if your files are readable by eyes - you can also merge sources. If you have GUI, you have all power of SCM and usability of tools.
...And be glad that you did not have to work with something like this
{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1251\deff0\deflang1049{\fonttbl{\f0\fswiss\fcharset204{\*\fname Arial;}Arial CYR;}}
{\colortbl ;\red0\green128\blue0;}
{\*\generator Msftedit 5.41.15.1515;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\f0\fs20\'dd\'f2\'ee \'ef\'e5\'f0\'e2\'e0\'ff \'f1\'f2\'f0\'ee\'ea\'e0\par
\'dd\'f2\'ee \b\'e2\'f2\'ee\'f0\'e0\'ff \cf1\b0\'f1\'f2\'f0\'ee\'ea\'e0\cf0\par
}
(ordinary pure-RTF with short russian text in it)
I work with many files doing general data analysis.
Things I want to know about my files include:
what data is contained in the file (in long and very long descriptive, english text)?
is the file downloaded from somewhere (where? when?) or generated by a program (which one?)
why I made this file, verbal description what I want to do with it, where it belongs in my data analysis workflow (additional english text description, can get very long as well)
For this, long filenames are simply not the solution! Even long filenames are too short for the full descriptions, and when actually working with the files (perl, awk, R) the long filenames get in the way.
What I do right now is make a readme in each dir with the filename, tab-separator, and the long description. However this solution is very cumbersome as you can imagine because the descriptions are completely separated from the filesystem and everything, the readme has to be maintained and updated separatedly etc.
Is there any tool one can use for really verbose, systematic descriptions of filenames? Maybe even integrated into the filesystem?
Operating system used: Windows 7 and Cygwin, various flavours of linux/unix through SSH and importing X