I'm trying to format the PHP code sections of a 700+ page book for Epub conversion. If I use soft returns at the end of the code lines, they get eaten. If I use hard returns (making each line a paragraph), I either get too much space between the lines, or not enough before and after the code section. If I add an empty line before and after the code section, it gets eaten.
There are thousands of lines of code in the book. Is there some way to handle this without manually editing the html file?
Is there some common format for these code section like being wrapped with PHP tags?
If they are PHP tags you can use this, which will wrap each tag set with a :
function fixPHPcode($matches)
{
return '<p class="php_code">' . $matches[0] . '</p>';
}
$data = preg_replace_callback('/<\?php(.|\s)+?\?>/i', 'fixPHPcode', $data);
I did try some fairly complex regex transforms, but I've found an easier method that actually works fairly well.
The secret is to create a style based on Word's "HTML Preformatted" style, or if you don't have that style, a style based on Normal that specifies Arial Unicode MS or Courier New as the font, with no proofing, left justified.
Indent with spaces and use soft returns (shift-enter) at the end of each line.
Calibre will produce acceptable Epub and Mobi versions of this. Courier is a crap font for code, but at least it's monospaced so the indents will line up, and people are used to seeing it as a code font.
Related
I am talking about github markdown here, for files like README.md.
Question:
Is it possible to strikethrough a complete code block in markdown on github?
I know how to mark text as a block of code
this is
multiline code
and
this
this
also
by indenting by 4 spaces or by using ``` or `...
I also know how to strike through texts using
del tag
s tag
~~
Temporary solution:
Independently they work fine, but together not as expected or desired. I tried several combinations of the above mentioned.
For now, I use this:
striked
through
by using ~~ and ` for every single line.
Requirement:
I would like to have a code formatted text striked through, where the code block is continuous:
unfortunately, this is
not striked through
or at least with only a small paragraph in between:
unfortunately, also not
striked through
Is this possible at all?
I found some old posts and hints on using jekyll, but what I was searching for is a simple way, preferably in markdown.
This would only be possible with raw HTML, which GitHub doesn't allow. But you may be able to use a diff instead.
Code blocks are for "pre-formatted" text only. The only formatting you can get in a code block is the formatting that can be represented in plain text (indentation, capitalization, etc). There is no mechanism to mark up the content of a code block (as bold, italic, stricken, underlined, etc). This was an intentional design decision. Otherwise, how would you be able to show Markdown text in a code block? If you want formatted text, then you need to use something other than a code block.
As the rules state:
HTML is a publishing format; Markdown is a writing format. Thus, Markdown’s formatting syntax only addresses issues that can be conveyed in plain text.
For any markup that is not covered by Markdown’s syntax, you simply use HTML itself.
Therefore you would need to format your own custom HTML code block with the various bits marked up properly:
<pre><code><del>some stricken code</del>
<del>A second line of stricken code</del>
</code></pre>
However, for security reasons, GitHub will strip out any such raw HTML in your Markdown. So while this works where you have full control of the entire stack, on a hosted service it is most likely not possible.
However, I'm assuming you want to show some changes made to a block of code. As it turns out, a specific format already exists for that, namely, a diff. Just use a fenced code block with diff as the language and GitHub will format it correctly:
```diff
Unchanged Line
- Removed Line
+ Added Line
```
You can see how GitHub displays the above code block live (you can also see that in raw), but I've included a screenshot below for convenience.
I realize that the formatting does not use strike-through, but it does use a commonly used and understood format. For more complex blocks, you should probably use the diff utility program to generate the diff for you.
Expanding on Waylan's answer:
This may be obvious to others, but it caught me. When you have indented lines, be sure + or - is the first character on the line or it won't highlight.
```diff
<div>
Unchanged Line
<ul>
- <li>This won't work</li>
- <li>This will</li>
+ <li>1st character, then indent</li>
</ul>
</div>
```
After much much trying, I finally got it to work! It boils down to this:
inside ``` block, nothing is rendered (other than syntax highlights for language specified)
inside <code> block, markdown won't render, only HTML. You can use <strike>. It's fine, but you don't get the syntax coloring
now for the magic: use HTML for striking, and markdown for coloring:
<strike>
```language
this is
multiline code
```
</strike>
P.S. ``` blocks should always be surrounded by blank lines to work
On the subject of marking up the content of a code block, to tack an italicized string on to the end of a line of "code", try something like:
<code>id\_pn\_aside\_subscriber\_form\__form\_id_</code>
(You can see this in action at: https://github.com/devonostendorf/post-notif#how-do-you-use-the-stylesheet_filename-attribute-with-the-shortcode)
I had a hard time finding an example that matched this precise use case, so I hope this proves useful for anyone else trying to accomplish a similar effect.
The <sup></sup> tag is used for superscripts. Creating a code block is done with backticks. The issue I have is when I try to create a superscript within a code block, it prints out the <sup></sup> tag instead of formatting the text between the tag.
How do I have superscript text formatted correctly when it's between backticks?
Post solution edit
Desired output:
A2 instead of A<sup>2</sup>
This is not possible unless you use raw HTML.
The rules specifically state:
With a code span, ampersands and angle brackets are encoded as HTML entities automatically, which makes it easy to include example HTML tags.
In other words, it is not possible to use HTML to format text in a code span. In fact, a code span is plain, unformatted text. Having any of that text appear as a superscript would mean it is not plain, unformatted text. Thus, this is not possible by design.
However, the rules also state:
Markdown is not a replacement for HTML, or even close to it. Its
syntax is very small, corresponding only to a very small subset of
HTML tags. The idea is not to create a syntax that makes it easier
to insert HTML tags. In my opinion, HTML tags are already easy to
insert. The idea for Markdown is to make it easy to read, write, and
edit prose. HTML is a publishing format; Markdown is a writing
format. Thus, Markdown's formatting syntax only addresses issues that
can be conveyed in plain text.
For any markup that is not covered by Markdown's syntax, you simply
use HTML itself. ...
So, if you really need some text in a code span to be in superscript, then use raw HTML for the entire span (be sure to escape things manually as required):
<code>A code span with <sup>superscript</sup> text and escaped characters: "<&>".</code>
Which renders as:
A code span with superscript text and escaped characters: "<&>".
This is expected behaviour:
Markdown wraps a code block in both <pre> and <code> tags.
You can use Unicode superscript and subscript characters within code blocks:
class SomeClass¹ {
}
Inputting these characters will depend on your operating system and configuration. I like to use compose key sequences on my Linux machines. As a last resort you should be able to copy and paste them from something like the Wikipedia page mentioned above.
¹Some interesting footnote, e.g. referencing MDN on <pre> and <code> tags.
If you're luck, the characters you want to superscript (or subscript) may have dedicated codepoints in Unicode. These will work inside codeblocks, as demonstrated in your question, where you include A² in backticks. Eg:
Water (chemical formula H₂O) is transparent, tasteless and odourless.
I've listed out the super and subscript Unicode characters in this Gist. You should be able to copy and paste any you need from there.
A simple html page has FORMATTED text - not fancy - line breaks, and italic.
I want to have a button that takes this formatted text, and copies it to the clipboard, formatted (it is planned to be pasted into some LibreOffice document later).
Couldn't find how to do it.
I tried ZeroClipboard, and a suggestion to parse the text, replacing ""-s to "\r\n". That indeed does the trick for line breaks, but what about italic?... Any means to get this functionality?...
When you create an italic tag the responsible for formatting the document and showing the text properly is the browser. If you want to copy the text you should get the text already parse and render by the browser or parse yourself the text like you did with break lines. For italics when you find a ... tag you must create the adequate text. That is, text in italics, but that depends on the language you are using, but i'm sure it can be done.
OK,
Turns out that ZeroClipboard had this functionality (of rendering the HTML text upon paste), but have disabled it.
However, the version that supports it can be found at: https://github.com/botcheddevil/ZeroClipboard
Note:
You may find that in this version, creating the client, binding the flash to a component, and handling the events are rather different than the documentation of current version of ZeroClipboard (https://github.com/zeroclipboard/zeroclipboard/blob/master/docs/instructions.md
I want to, using the DocX library [https://docx.codeplex.com/], convert a .docx document to use a different font. Does anybody know how to do that? The samples projects are very spare, and the documentation is nonexistent.
I find, too, that often there are extraneous spaces in documents, and I want to iterate over all these until there are never two contiguous spaces. I can do this in a loop, I guess, replacing " " (2 spaces) with " " (1 space) until " " (2 spaces) is no longer found.
However, I also want to remove superfluous line breaks that sometimes occur when copying-and-pasting text into a document. I can do it "manually" (in Libre Office, not sure how it's done in MS Word), as I got an answer to this question:
(select "Regular Expressions" and then replace "$" (without the quotes) with a space)
...but how programmatically, with DocX?
Additionally, in some cases I want to ADD line breaks/"paragraph returns" where there are legitimate line breaks between the end of one paragraph and the start of another, but no extra line to separate them visually. According to this:
...I can add a paragraph/line break to a legitimate line break by searching for "$" and replacing that with "\n\n"
This does work, too (manually, in Libre Office); but again...how to do this with the DocX library?
It appears that not all of this is possible with the current version of the DocX library you are using. If it is not exposed in documentation, the functions might as well not exist, and you should not be using undocumented features.
There is a much more mature library available, however, called the "Open XML SDK", that can do everything you need.
The correct way to change a font, regardless of whether you are doing it with the document editor, or you are writing a program to manipulate these files, is to change the appropriate text's style attribute, or changing the definition of style in use.
You should never, ever, ever, ever directly change the font of any text. Personally, I think that the 'font type' and 'font size' menus should be removed entirely from word/libreoffice/etc, and only be accessible inside a 'change style properties' dialog; the only reason to directly apply a font is if you are actually providing an example of particular typeface under discussion!
See How to: Replace the styles parts in a word processing document (Open XML SDK) from the MSDN documentation for a description of the way that works.
To search and replace text, the applicable MSDN page is How to: Search and replace text in a document part (Open XML SDK). For specifically replacing multiple spaces with a single space, there are numerous results on Google that should all work to at least some degree.
I am trying to extract text from PDF files using Perl. I have been using pdftotext.exe from command line (i.e using Perl system function) for extracting text from PDF files, this method works fine.
The problem is that we have symbols like α, β and other special characters in the PDF files which are not being displayed in the generated txt file. Also few extra spaces are being added randomly in the text.
Is there a better and more reliable way to extract text from PDF files such that the text will include all the symbols like α, β etc and the text will exactly match the text in the PDF (i.e without extra spaces)?
These modules you can acheive the extract text from pdf
PDF::API2
CAM::PDF
CAM::PDF::PageText
From CPAN
my $pdf = CAM::PDF->new($filename);
my $pageone_tree = $pdf->getPageContentTree(1);
print CAM::PDF::PageText->render($pageone_tree);
This module attempts to extract sequential text from a PDF page. This is not a robust process, as PDF text is graphically laid out in arbitrary order. This module uses a few heuristics to try to guess what text goes next to what other text, but may be fooled easily by, say, subscripts, non-horizontal text, changes in font, form fields etc.
All those disclaimers aside, it is useful for a quick dump of text from a simple PDF file.
You may never get an appropriate solution to your problem. The PDF format can encode text either as ASCII values with a font applied, or it can encode it as a bitmap. If the tool that created your PDF decided to encode the special characters as a bitmap, you will be out of luck (unless you want to get into OCR solutions, of course).
I'm not a Perl user but I imagine you'll struggle to find a better free text extractor than pdftotext.
pdftotext usually recognises non-ASCII characters fine, is it possible it's extracting them ok but the app you're using to view the text file isn't using the correct encoding? If pdftoetxt on windows is the same as the one on my linux system, then it defaults to exporting as utf-8.
There is getpdftext.pl; part of CAM::PDF.
Well, I tried 2-3 perl modules like CAM::PDF, API2 but the problem remains the same! I'm parsing a pdf file containing main pages. Cam or API2 parses the plain text very well. However, they are not able to parse the code snippet [code snippet usually are in different font & encoding than plain text].
James Healy is correct. After trying CAM::PDF and PDF::API2, the former of which I've had some success reading text, downloading pdftotext worked great for a number of my implementations.
If on windows go here and download xpdf precompiled binary:
http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/download.html
Then, if you need to run this within perl use system, e.g.,:
system("C:\Utilities\xpdfbin-win-3.04\bin64\pdftotext.exe $saveName");
where $saveName is the full path to your PDF file.
This hopefully leaves you with a text file you can open and parse in perl.
i tried this module which is working fine for special characters of pdf..
!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use PDF::OCR::Thorough;
my $filename = "pdf.pdf";
my $pdf = PDF::OCR::Thorough->new($filename);
my $text = $pdf->get_text();
print "$text";
Take a look at PDFBox. It is a library but i think that it also comes with some tool to do text extracting.