I am trying to flatten bitmap images in a PDF document as opposed to keep separatelayers. For example, let's say I have a document with two square images that are partially overlaying each other. I would like to merge them so that the user cannot individually select one of the squares to copy it out of the document. They'll be able to select both, I would think, but I don't want them to be able to isolate one of them. My client has a more complicated reason for wanting this restriction, but this is the simplest explanation. I would like to solve this with iTextSharp, but another product would be fine with me. I have used iTextSharp for form flattening, but I can't figure out how to flatten images. Thank you.
Edit
I realized another solution might just be to prevent selection within the document, which would hopefully prevent copying and pasting. I would guess that all document readers would not have to abide by my command to prevent selection, but as long as Adobe Reader (and maybe Foxit Reader) do abide by it, that should be good enough.
As you say you can use other products, I'll show a way to do merge layers using ABCpdf
Dim oDoc As New WebSupergoo.ABCpdf7.Doc
Using oDoc
oDoc.Read("D:\example.pdf")
Dim iTotal As Integer = oDoc.PageCount()
For i As Integer = 1 To iTotal
oDoc.PageNumber = 1
oDoc.Rendering.Save("D:\" & i & ".JPG")
oDoc.Delete(oDoc.Page)
Next
For i As Integer = 1 To iTotal
oDoc.AddPage()
oDoc.AddImage("D:\" & i & ".JPG")
oDoc.Flatten()
Next
oDoc.Save("D:\example_abc.pdf")
End Using
Original:
https://encodable.com/cgi-bin/filechucker.cgi?action=landing&path=/SOabcpdf/&file=example.pdf
Procesed:
https://encodable.com/cgi-bin/filechucker.cgi?action=landing&path=/SOabcpdf/&file=example_abc.pdf
You have to change the quality, reading ABCpdf Help.
http://www.websupergoo.com/helppdfnet/source/4-examples/19-rendering.htm
Edit:
As you don't want only merge image, but the copy protection, ABcPDF has this:
Dim oDoc As New WebSupergoo.ABCpdf7.Doc
Using oDoc
oDoc.Read("D:\example.pdf")
oDoc.Encryption.Type = 2
oDoc.Encryption.CanCopy = False
oDoc.Encryption.OwnerPassword = "password"
oDoc.Save("D:\example_abc.pdf")
End Using
Related
I have expended a good deal of effort trying to convert emails to PDF.
I am using Delphi 10.4 although that is not necessarily relevant to the question.
I came up with a solution that involves extraction of the body from the email in whatever format (HTML, RTF or TXT). I use INDY for this or Outlook if email is in MSG format.
I then save the body to file and open it using MS Word via automation. Then it should be a simple matter of saving the Word document in PDF format.
However, MS Word doesn't seem to read html files that well.
From the numerous samples of emails that I have tried, I have come across several issues which were complex to solve.
Examples:
html tables expanding beyond the document's page width. I solved this by working out what the page width is, setting the offending table's width as fixed and setting it to the page width and finally resizing it's columns proportionately to its new width.
That worked well until I tried to process an email with html tables with differing numbers of columns/cells per row. That causes a crash. I solved that by handling the exception and iterating through each table by row and working with its cells rather than columns.
Images within table cells often overlap the cell and the page width. Solved by iterating through all InlineShapes, checking whether they are within a table and, if so setting their width to the cell width.
There have been other issues, but I now have something that seems to work pretty well on a fairly disparate bunch of emails.
But I would think it incredibly likely that there will be new issues that will crop up from time to time and since this procedure is designed to deal unsupervised with batches of emails, this is a concern.
So my question is, does anyone know of a better way of dealing with this? For example, is there some simple way of getting Word to to "nicely" format the html on loading so that it displays and saves to PDF in a readable fashion similar to how it looks when you open the same email in Outlook.
Have you tried using the WordEditor property of the Outlook Inspector object? This returns the Microsoft Word Document Object Model of the message and you can export directly to PDF from that.
Here is a basic example...
Private Sub Demo()
Dim MailItem As MailItem
Dim FileName As String
FileName = "C:\Users\Sam\Desktop\Email.pdf"
Set MailItem = ActiveExplorer.Selection.Item(1)
With MailItem.GetInspector
.WordEditor.ExportAsFixedFormat FileName, 17
.Close 0
End With
MsgBox "Export complete"
End Sub
I have designed a document in Libre Office Draw, and now need to personalize it by filling certain controls (mainly labels) with names read from a text file.
Reading from a text file was trivial, but am facing difficulties in obtaining a reference to a control placed in a Libre Office Draw document; all the functions mentioned were related to controls placed on a dialog, and did not seem applicable in this case.
This might be the first lead into reaching my goal:
document = ThisComponent.CurrentController.Frame
dispatcher = createUnoService("com.sun.star.frame.DispatchHelper")
But then, how to find a control placed on 'document' named, say, "MyLabel1"? Once the label is filled, the document would need to be exported to PDF.
Thanks a lot!
To export a LO Draw document to PDF from Basic you can use the following code.
Sub ExportToPDF
sURL = convertToURL("d:\temp\lo_draw.pdf")
dim mFileType(0)
mFileType(0) = createUnoStruct("com.sun.star.beans.PropertyValue")
mFileType(0).Name = "FilterName"
mFileType(0).Value = "draw_pdf_Export"
thisComponent.storeToURL(sURL, mFileType())
End Sub
To figure out how to get access to the "labels" please provide a sample LO Draw document.
Is there a way to take a value from a field on a form and use it as a reference to a different field in the same form, and not just literally? I want to be able to manually enter something like [txtFlavor] in one field and have it show the actual flavor, the value of the field named "txtFlavor" in another field, and not just the string "[txtFlavor]". I'm basically trying to store some vba references (terminology?) in a table so I can bring up a string of text with references to values on the form.
I have been asked to create a system that will store letter templates in Access 2010 and allow users to choose a record with personal information and insert that info into a template letter, preferably displaying it on a form immediately in plain text. I already proposed using reports to do this but that was unacceptable to the end users. They really just want a form that combines
a) contact records, one at a time
with
b) letter templates, one at a time
I've been trying to store the template info with it's form references in a table, but I have yet to be able to make references pull data from another text field on the form.
Is it possible and/or sensible to try to store something like the following in a table, or to enter it into a field on a form?
[txtFlavor] & " is dull but popular."
and then have it show up elsewhere in the form as
Vanilla is dull but popular.
I sure feel dumb and am sure I've missed something obvious. Everything I do is just repeated literally and not interpreted as a reference.
You could get your users to create their templates using 'tags' as placeholders for the database information, in a similar way to how you would design a merge document in Word. So in your example above, the template document would look like:
{Flavor} is dull but popular.
When it comes time to create the merged result you would need to use the Replace function to change these tags to actual data values. So if you had a read-only text box on your form, the control source could be:
=Replace([txtTemplate], "{Flavor}", [Flavor])
I assume you would have lots of potential tags, so using this approach you would need to nest the Replace functions. I have split my nesting across multiple lines to make it a bit more readable:
=Replace(
Replace(
Replace([txtTemplate], "{EmpName}", [EmpName]),
"{EmpAddress}", [EmpAddress]),
"{EmpPhone}", [EmpPhone])
If you had many more database fields/tags this would start to become very unwieldy so I would recommend using some VBA to make life easier, maybe something along the lines of:
Dim rsSource As Recordset
Dim strMerge As String
Dim intField As Integer
'Assuming your form has a field called EmpNo (numeric data) that you can use to pull data...
Set rsSource = CurrentDb.OpenRecordset ("Select EmpName, EmpAddress, EmpPhone From Employees Where EmpNo = " & Me.EmpNo)
strMerge = txtTemplate
For intField = 0 to rsSource.Fields.Count - 1
strMerge = Replace(strMerge, "{" & rsSource(intField).Name & "}", rsSource(intField))
Next intField
txtMerge = strMerge
rsSource.Close
Set rsSource = Nothing
You could put this code in the AfterUpdate event of your txtTemplate text box and it would update the contents of the txtMerge text box. You either need your tag names to match your database columns, or else you could alias the columns in the Select statement so they match the tag names.
I am using iTextSharp to extract data from pdfs.
I stumbled across the following problem, depicted by the scenario below:
I created a sample excel file to illustrate. Here is what it looks like:
I convert it to a pdf, using one of the many free online converters available out there, which generates a pdf looking like (when I generated the pdf I did not apply the styling to the excel):
Now, using iTextSharp to extract the data from the pdf, returns me the following string as the data extracted:
As you can see, wrapped cell data generate new lines, where each wrapped piece of data separated by a single white space.
The problem: how does one identify, now, to which column a given piece of wrapped data belongs to ? If only iTextSharp preserved as many white spaces as columns...
In my example - how can I identify to which column does 111 belong ?
Update 1:
A similar problem occurs whenever a field has more than one word (i.e., contains white spaces). For example, considering the 1st line of the sample above:
say it looked like
---A--- ---B--- ---C--- ---D---
aaaaaaa bb b cccc
iText again would generate the extraction for this one as:
aaaaaaa bb b cccc
Same problem here, in having to determine the borders of each column.
Update 2:
A sample of the real pdf file I am working with:
This is how the pdf data looks like.
In addition to Chris' generic answer, some background in iText(Sharp) content parsing...
iText(Sharp) provides a framework for content extraction in the namespace iTextSharp.text.pdf.parser / package com.itextpdf.text.pdf.parser. This franework reads the page content, keeps track of the current graphics state, and forwards information on pieces of content to the IExtRenderListener or IRenderListener / ExtRenderListener or RenderListener the user (i.e. you) provides. In particular it does not interpret structure into this information.
This render listener may be a text extraction strategy (ITextExtractionStrategy / TextExtractionStrategy), i.e. a special render listener which is predominantly designed to extract a pure text stream without formatting or layout information. And for this special case iText(Sharp) additionally provides two sample implementations, the SimpleTextExtractionStrategy and the LocationTextExtractionStrategy.
For your task you need a more sophisticated render listener which either
exports the text with coordinates (Chris in one of his answers has provided an extended LocationTextExtractionStrategy which can additionally provide positions and bounding boxes of text chunks) allowing you in additional code to analyse tabular structures; or
does the analysis of tabular data itself.
I do not have an example for the latter variant because generically recognizing and parsing tables is a whole project in itself. You might want to look into the Tabula project for inspiration; this project is surprisingly good at the task of table extraction.
PS: If you feel more at home with trying to extract structured content from a pure string representation of the content which nonetheless tries to reflect the original layout, you might try something like what is proposed in this answer, a variant of the LocationTextExtractionStrategy working similar to the pdftotext -layout tool; only the changes to be applied to the LocationTextExtractionStrategy are shown there.
PPS: Extraction of data from very specific PDF tables may be much easier; for example have a look at this answer which demonstrates that after some PDF analysis the specific way a given table is created might give rise to a simple custom render listener for extracting the table data. This can make sense for a single PDF with a table spanning many many pages like in the case of that answer, or it can make sense if you have many PDFs identically created by the same software.
This is why I asked for a representative sample file in a comment to your question
Concerning your comments
Still with the pdf example above, both with an implementation from scratch of ITextExtractionStrategy and with extending LocationExtractionStrategy, I see that each RenderText is called at the following chunks: Fi, el, d, A, Fi, el, d... and so on. Can this be changed?
The chunks of text you get as separate RenderText calls are not separated by accident or some random decision of iText. They are the very strings drawn separately in the page content!
In your sample "Fi", "el", "d", and "A" come in different RenderText calls because the content stream contains operations in which first "Fi" is drawn, then "el", then "d", then "A".
This may sound weird at first. A common cause for such torn up words is that PDF does not use the kerning information from fonts; to apply kerning, therefore, the PDF generating software has to insert tiny forward or backward jumps between characters which should be farther from or nearer to each other than without kerning. Thus, words often are torn apart between kerning pairs.
So this cannot be changed, you will get those pieces, and it is the job of the text extraction strategy to put them together.
By the way, there are worse PDFs, some PDF generators position each and every glyph separately, foremost such generators which predominantly build GUIs but can as a feature automatically export GUI canvasses as PDFs.
I would expect that in entering the realm of "adding my own implementation" I would have control over how to determine what is a "chunk" of text.
You can... well, you have to decide which of the incoming pieces belong together and which don't. E.g. do glyphs with the same y coordinate form a single line? Or do they form separate lines in different columns which just happen to be located next to each other.
So yes, you decide which glyphs you interpret as a single word or as content of a single table cell, but your input consists of the groups of glyphs used in the actual PDF content stream.
Not only that, in none of the interface's methods I can "spot" how/where it deals with non-text data/images - so I could intercede with the spacing issue (RenderImage is not called)
RenderImage will be called for embedded bitmap images, JPEGs etc. If you want to be informed about vector graphics, your strategy will also have to implement IExtRenderListener which provides methods ModifyPath, RenderPath and ClipPath.
This isn't really an answer but I needed a spot to show some things that might help you understand things.
First "conversion" from Excel, Word, PowerPoint, HTML or whatever to PDF is almost always going to be a destructive change. The destructive part is very important and it happens because you are taking data from a program that has very specific knowledge of what that data represents (Excel) and you are turning it into drawing commands in a very generic universal format (PDF) that only cares about what the data looks like, not the data itself. Unless the data is "tagged" (and it almost never is these days still) then there is no context for the drawing commands. There are no paragraphs, there are no sentences, there are no columns, rows, tables, etc. There's literally just draw this letter at x,y and draw this word at a,b.
Second, imagine you Excel file had that following data and for some reason that last column was narrower than the others when the PDF was made:
Column A | Column B | Column
C
Data #1 Data #2 Data
#3
You and I have context so we know that the second and fourth lines are really just the continuation of the first and third lines. But since iText doesn't have any context during extraction it doesn't think like that and it sees four lines of text. In fact, since it doesn't have context it doesn't even see columns, just the lines themselves.
Third, although a very small thing you need to understand that you don't draw spaces in PDF. Imagine the three column table below:
Column A | Column B | Column C
Yes
If you extracted that from a PDF you'd get this data:
Column A | Column B | Column C
Yes
Inside the PDF the word "Yes" will be just drawn at a certain x coordinate that you and I consider to be under the third column and it won't have a bunch of spaces in front of it.
As I said at the beginning, this isn't much of an answer but hopefully it will explain to you the problem that you are trying to solve. If your PDF is tagged then it will have context and you can use that context during extraction. Context isn't universal, however, so there usually isn't just a magic "insert context" checkbox. Excel actually does have a checkbox (if I remember correctly) to make a tagged PDF during export and it ultimately creates a tagged PDF using HTML-like tags for tables. Very primitive but it will works. However it will be up to you to parse this context.
Leaving here an alternative strategy for extracting the data - that does not solve the problem of who are spaces treated/can be treated, but gives you somewhat more control over the extraction by specifying geometric areas you want to extract text from. Taken from here.
public static System.util.RectangleJ GetRectangle(float distanceInPixelsFromLeft, float distanceInPixelsFromBottom, float width, float height)
{
return new System.util.RectangleJ(
distanceInPixelsFromLeft,
distanceInPixelsFromBottom,
width,
height);
}
public static void Strategy2()
{
// In this example, I'll declare a pageNumber integer variable to
// only capture text from the page I'm interested in
int pageNumber = 1;
var text = new StringBuilder();
List<Tuple<string, int>> result = new List<Tuple<string, int>>();
// The PdfReader object implements IDisposable.Dispose, so you can
// wrap it in the using keyword to automatically dispose of it
using (var pdfReader = new PdfReader("D:/Example.pdf"))
{
float distanceInPixelsFromLeft = 20;
//float distanceInPixelsFromBottom = 730;
float width = 300;
float height = 10;
for (int i = 800; i >= 0; i -= 10)
{
var rect = GetRectangle(distanceInPixelsFromLeft, i, width, height);
var filters = new RenderFilter[1];
filters[0] = new RegionTextRenderFilter(rect);
ITextExtractionStrategy strategy =
new FilteredTextRenderListener(
new LocationTextExtractionStrategy(),
filters);
var currentText = PdfTextExtractor.GetTextFromPage(
pdfReader,
pageNumber,
strategy);
currentText =
Encoding.UTF8.GetString(Encoding.Convert(
Encoding.Default,
Encoding.UTF8,
Encoding.Default.GetBytes(currentText)));
//text.Append(currentText);
result.Add(new Tuple<string, int>(currentText, currentText.Length));
}
}
// You'll do something else with it, here I write it to a console window
//Console.WriteLine(text.ToString());
foreach (var line in result.Distinct().Where(r => !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(r.Item1)))
{
Console.WriteLine("Text: [{0}], Length: {1}", line.Item1, line.Item2);
}
//Console.WriteLine("", string.Join("\r\n", result.Distinct().Where(r => !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(r.Item1))));
Outputs:
PS.: We are still left with the problem of how to deal with spaces/non text data.
Does anyone know how I can use matlab and activeX to add hyperlinks to powerpoint files?
There are two helpful posts on MatlabCentral, but they don't give me everything I need. The first explains how to create a powerpoint file using matlab: "Create Powerpoint Files with Matlab"
and the second shows how to use ActiveX to insert hyperlinks into Excel:"Add Hyperlink in Excel from Matlab" (See the second answer by Kaustubha)
I tried to merge the two answers. In powerpoint the slide objects have the .Hyperlinks attribute, but there is no .Add method for .Hyperlinks as there is in Excel.
Here is the code I have so far. I would like the link to appear in a table:
ppt = actxserver('PowerPoint.Application');
op = invoke(ppt.Presentations,'Add');
slide = invoke(op.Slides,'Add',1,1);
sH = op.PageSetup.SlideHeight; % slide height
sW = op.PageSetup.SlideWidth; % silde width
table = invoke(slide.Shapes, 'AddTable', 1, 3, 0.05*sW, sH*.2, 0.9*sW, sH*.60);
table.Table.Cell(1,1).Shape.TextFrame.TextRange.Text = 'www.stackoverflow.com';
% Add hyperlink to text in table using ActiveX
% slide.Hyperlinks - this exists but there is no add feature
invoke(op,'Save');
invoke(op,'Close');
invoke(ppt,'Quit');
delete(ppt);
Slide objects have a .Hyperlinks collection that you can examine to learn how many hyperlinks there are, where they point and so forth. To add a hyperlink you have to work with individual shapes or text ranges.
Sub AddAHyperlink()
Dim oSh As Shape
' As an example we're going to add hyperlinks to the
' currently selected shape.
' You could use any other method of getting a reference to
' a shape that you like, however:
Set oSh = ActiveWindow.Selection.ShapeRange(1)
' Add a hyperlink to the shape itself:
With oSh
.ActionSettings(1).Hyperlink.Address = "http://www.pptfaq.com"
' you can also add a subaddress if required
End With
' Or add the hyperlink to the text within the shape:
With oSh.TextFrame.TextRange
.Text = "Hyperlink me, daddy, 8 to the click"
.ActionSettings(1).Hyperlink.Address = "http://www.pptools.com"
End With
End Sub
To access the text within a table cell you'd do as you're already doing:
table.Table.Cell(1,1).Shape.TextFrame.TextRange
or
table.Table.Cell(1,1).Shape
or
Set oSh = table.Table.Cell(1,1).Shape
then use the same code as I've shown above
Not sure if this is still an active request from anyone and potentially the program capability has changed; but for anyone else that might be interested it does appear to be possible to add links.
Here is an example from some code I wrote...The slide number/item references will need to get updated for your task but I think it covers the key points. In this example the goal was to add a hyperlink to another slide within the presentation.
hyperlink_text = sprintf('%0.0f, %0.0f, %s', Presentation.Slides.Range.Item(3+i).SlideID, Presentation.Slides.Range.Item(3+i).SlideIndex,Presentation.Slides.Range.Item(3+i).Shapes.Item(2).TextFrame.TextRange.Text);
The hyperlink text will look something like this, as a text string. '250, 4, Slide Title'
Presentation.Slides.Range.Item(3).Shapes.Item(2).Table.Cell(1+i,1).Shape.TextFrame.TextRange.ActionSettings.Item(1).Hyperlink.SubAddress = hyperlink_text;
For internal links the Hyperlink.Address field can be left blank.
It appears that the only thing that was missing from the prior answers was that when using Matlab to execute the powerpoint VBA you need to use ActionSettings.Item(1) to refer to the mouseclick action instead of ActionSettings(1) that was shown from basic powerpoint VBA.
Hopefully this can be helpful for anyone else still looking.
Note that I am currently using Matlab R2017A and Powerpoint in Microsoft 365 ProPlus