I need to create a program that creates Visio compatible file based on the provided data but i'm really lost at where to start.
I just need to draw simpe things like lines, images and text.
First, you can use (automate) Visio itself to draw the stuff. This assumes that you'll have Visio installed on the computer where your program will run.
Check out Visio SDK, it has many examples to start with.
Second, there is for example aspose.diagrams library (commercial) which can do that without Visio installed.
Third, with new Visio 2013 vsdx (open XML) you can use OpenXML SDK, to generate the drawing, and do the heavy lifting yourself.
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I'm now working with tons of MS Word files and trying to find a way in improving my workflow.
I'm wondering if there's a way to create a desktop app which can preview certain parts from a Word file, select them and generate a new one with controls in Word's text style, paragraph, etc.
I supposed that this would take MS Word API and some frame structure particularly. I've been using Electron/node.js to create some cross platform applications, wondering if it can do as well? Or is there any reference that I can dig in?
Sorry if this sounds like a rookie one. I've tried to search but still can't find out where to start.
There are three possible ways to get the job done:
Automate MS Word to get job done. See Automate MS Office Applications using Python win32com module for more information. For example:
import win32com.client
word = win32com.client.Dispatch("Word.Application")
Use the Open XML SDK for generating Word documents at runtime, see Welcome to the Open XML SDK 2.5 for Office for more information.
Use third-party components.
If you are on Windows, there seem to be some way to access Word files in Python: https://www.blog.pythonlibrary.org/2010/07/16/python-and-microsoft-office-using-pywin32/. Maybe in node too.
I want to load an illustrator file in my game. Unity should recognize different layers, colors, and forms, and layers with text and display them in a 2d canvas.
The goal is that the players can click on different forms and that unity recognize them as individual forms. Do you know any unity asset or a way to make this possible?
For example when you import an image like this as an illustrator file -> https://www.mandala-bilder.de/mandala/erwachsenemandalas/mandala-ideen-erwachsene.pdf
I thought about an SVG file but then I can´t use the different layers.
Illustrator has a proprietary file format, it has no publicly available documentation for newer versions. While you can dig out old specifications (this is why some programs only support AI files saved in ancient versions) http://www.idea2ic.com/File_Formats/Adobe%20Illustrator%20File%20Format.pdf I do not think you can just go in and start supporting a 2021 variant without requesting (and motivating) the spec from Adobe. They might also want to charge you for it.
SVG on the other hand is free and it's spec is public so there is much widely spread support. also SVG supports groups which can get your around the need for layers
Vector Express is a free conversion API you should be able to use. (requires a network connection, though)
https://github.com/smidyo/vectorexpress-api
You should be able to POST a request (https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Networking.UnityWebRequest.Post.html) to this endpoint, with the raw AI file as the body:
POST https://vector.express/api/v2/public/convert/ai/gs/pdf/psd2svg/svg/
This will return a JSON object with a link to an SVG file that you can then download and display.
I'm attempting to modify a Visio file (Open XML format) without having to use the Windows Visio application. My first experiment is just to use 7zip to unzip a known good .vsdx file that was created using Visio. That is all good; I can view the content of the package. Without making any modifications, I use 7zip to re-zip the content and renamed to .vsdx, but when I tried to open the resulting new file using Visio, it complains that the file is corrupt. Is there a way to manually re-zip the content into something that Visio accepts as a valid Visio file? I suspect that there may be some sort of checks for the validity of the file, but can't find what that may be. Thanks for any input.
I would use some form of OpenXML library to get at the file's guts using some sort of "approved magic".
Understanding that you might not want to do whatever you're doing via programming, I looked for some sort of free editor.
I found this free plug-in for Visual Studio:
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=bsivanov.OpenXMLPackageEditorforVisualStudio
It works in the free "Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2019" as well. I just opened the dev environment (aka: the application) and dragged a Visio .vsdx file into the app. It opened with a tree-like editor. I was able to dig down until I found the visio > pages > page1.xml "leaf". Inside there, I was able to change some text on a shape, then save the "package".
Whatever this tool does, it saves the file properly, and I was able to open the altered .vsdx file in Visio. And the text that I changed in the editor was indeed changed inside of Visio!
I think I've used this in the past:
"Welcome to the Open XML SDK 2.5 for Office"
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/open-xml/open-xml-sdk
https://github.com/OfficeDev/Open-XML-SDK
To edit Visio files without the Visio application, you'll still need to understand how Visio works, to some extent.
A simple example:
I changed the text on a shape fairly easily within one of the page.xml files. That was easy. Then I wanted to add a copy of that shape. It was simple enough to copy and paste the whole xml block for the existing shape, then change the PinX and PinY attributes to move the shape to a different location on the page.
But you won't see that shape unless you give it a unique ID within the page. I tested deleting the ID attribute (to see if Visio would figure it out on open and assign one automatically), but it didn't work. If the ID is the same as another shape, the shape is ignored when you open the file. Once I changed ID to something unused, I did see the new copy of the shape.
If you create grouped shapes, or shapes that have advanced behavior (SmartShapes, ShapeSheet formulas, etc.), then this could get complicated. As formulas need to reference other shapes by ID, so you need to manage the IDs! For simple boxes and lines, etc., it might work well (and fast) to generate these things via OpenXML. Good luck!
I do not feel like reinventing the whole wheel on Windows Store Apps, but is there any readily available way that I am able to parse OpenXML document quickly on Windows Store Apps?
I had been using the OpenXML SDK (currently on 2.5) but it is unfortunately tied with WindowsBase and I can't reference it in my project.
I read somewhere which mentioned that I should be looking at Windows.IO.Packaging, I do understand that OpenXML is a container of all files, but that is "reinventing the whole wheel" to me already, and I need to go down to the file access level to read the WorkBookPart and WorkSheetPart` (... blah blah blah).
Thanks!~
Apparently I took the chance to learn OpenXML and was able to parse the .XLSX file on my own. It wasn't as difficult as I initially feared. The fact that we can use ZipArchive to help derive the corresponding Sheet, coupling with the use of Linq to Xml means that a custom-made ExcelReader class takes about 1 hour to write.
I am trying to create an iPhone game with fairly large levels. Hard coding the platforms and physics objects is very time consuming. I have seen some people have made their own parsers for svg files to use in box2D, and Riq is selling levelSVG but it is a little pricey for me at the moment, and I only need basic features. Is there a tutorial on how to code a parser available online?
Have you taken a look at SVGQuartzRenderer? It is designed to render SVG files in Quartz, so I imagine you might be able to pull out the SVG parsing code from this. It's opensource, MIT license.
I don't know about any tutorials but its fairly easy to do this using an XML parsing library. In my project I use MiniDOM to load an svg file and then I convert the elements into objects in the box2d word. The only thing that I had to do manually was the parsing of the path element.
I've written an extensive tutorial on how to parse SVG files using Apache Batik SVG library. Included with the tutorial are a set of classes and a function I wrote in Java which will generate a set of Vec2 points given the location of the SVG file. If you're using Objective C you could try to port the scripts or at least get an idea of the process involved. The scripts support multiple paths per SVG file, transformations, straight lines and quadratic splines. The first tutorial in the series can be found here.