I have a question about textboxes or forms. I don't have any experience with them.
I would like to have a textbox/form where the user can type/copy text too.
There should be a save button and the saved text should be loaded and be editable again.
This isn't an internet application, so I don't need to specify a database of users.
Searching the web got me a lot of partial asp/.net/php solutions. I don't really know much of these.
My question is, would this be possible? And where should I start?
Thanx
I would use PHP for this, if you're unfamiliar there are some great learning resources at W3 Schools PHP tutuorial as well as the documentation at PHP.net you'll want to write an HTML form that submits to a php script. In this script you can save text to a file using the fwrite() function and load saved text using fopen(). Definitely have a look through the w3 Schools php guide if you're new to this.
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.
To preface this I'm not an ExactTarget expert.... We use ExactTarget and are interested in more archiving our email newsletters so that our subscribers can later use our articles as a reference. We have an archive folder set up in the exact target system, but that is not customer-facing and contains things like extra code.
As I understand it, the current process for archiving involves taking screenshots of the email that is sent out which is stitched together as a PDF. The PDF's are then stuck behind a password protected folder on a website.
Obviously, this is a hacky/low-tech way to do this.
Are there any ways to export these mails for archival purposes that people are using?
I am guessing from the above that you are using the premade templates and creating content using the Exact Target WYSIWYG editor. From there I am assuming also that these articles are in content boxes and HOPEFULLY each 'article' is in a single content box.
If so, then your best bet is to go to the HTML tab on this box and copy that code there and have this inserted onto your company blog (or website if you do not have a blog). Your network admin or website designer will likely know the best way to insert these snippets of code to fit the layout and navigation of the site.
If your message is not personalized, or if so you mdke a generic recipient in your list, you may be able to use the 'view as webpage' link to get the source code. Not sure if those links expire after X days or something though.I have never tried this or tested, but on most email sends there is a "view as webpage" link, maybe try taking one of these links and either hosting on your blog/site or using that link as a reference for your customers.
Using a PDF or screen shots is far from optimal as the content becomes an image and loses a lot of value.
Hope this helps.
I have a great concern in deploying the TinyMCE editor on a website. Looking at the code parsed by the editor it does a great job, and I leave the HTML button off the toolbar configuration so users can not inject their own source.
However, from what I read in the TinyMCE docs, it claims to degrade nicely to a regular textarea should javascript be disabled on a users browser... and therein lies my concern. If it does revert to a normal textarea, then the user is then able to easily inject their own HTML, and this leaves me with a security concern.
I just pass through data created with TinyMCE, and it is used within another page created by my script, so it poses no security risk to my server. The security concern arises over what malicious data may be passed to another user viewing the generated page.
I know many of you will tell me to just use regexes, or parse this data, but that itself could be a nightmare, as I would be trying to either...
a.) Use regexes to try and clean up the HTML without breaking the generated page,
and it is better to parse the data for that anyway.
b.) Reparsing data that has already been parsed by the RTF editor, which also
would probably end up breaking the generated page.
Anyone with any previous experience with this type of scenario, I would really appreciate a 'heads-up' as to any other risks that using an RTF editor for user data could entail.
I would really like to provide this as a user option, but not if the risks outweigh giving the user using the RTF a chance to take a wack at another user viewing the page that is generated by the script.
My gut feeling is to steer a wide berth around use of the RTF at this point.
Thanks for any direction you can give me with your own experiences.
You cannot have client-side security on the web. You simply can't trust the browser, because it's easy for a malicious user to substitute a replacement browser that does whatever he wants.
If you accept HTML from users (using TinyMCE or through any other method) and display it to other users, you must sanitize or validate the HTML in some way on the server. If you're using Perl, the leading package seems to be HTML::Scrubber (along with various other modules that help you plug it in to various frameworks). I haven't had occasion to try it myself.
The TinyMCE Security page mentions some ways to make it harder for people to submit arbitrary HTML, but you still need server-side checks.
Regex is generally not considered good for parsing HTML
RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags but I have noted the "perl" tag :)
My advice when taking markup from users is to always parse it through something that can accept mal-formed HTML and return well formed HTML. These parses generally produce something that can be queried and updated with some form of XPath.
In Python there is a module called BeautifulSoup, Ruby has Nokogiri and in ASP.NET there is a project called HtmlAgilityPack that all do this sort of thing. I'm not sure what library perl has, but I'm sure there would be something.
I am a php programmer, but new to zend framework.
I want to upload image, create medium and small(thubmnail) image on fly, I passed a couple of hours searching for a php library [ compatible with zend ] that can make my tasks easy. I dont want to write the code that already exists. thanks for any help.
I want also to know wether Zend_GData can be used to upload files to my server and not on google's. If tried that hack, please tell me how you did it.
any link, or suggestion is welcome. thanks and have a great day.
To upload I use:
http://www.uploadify.com/
To manipulate images (resize, crop, lots of stuff) I use GD wich is often installed with php.
http://php.net/manual/en/book.image.php
I also use http://phpthumb.sourceforge.net/ and its real easy to use.
With all that you should be set.
Are there any good alternatives to Adobe Acrobat for creating interactive PDFs? The terminology is a little fuzzy here - by interactive, I mean "able to be filled in", and not necessarily "scriptable". So this form would be for data collection, rather than report generation which seems to be the common scenario for pdf-related questions on SO.
The trick is that they need to be fillable using Adobe Reader. For those who have not experienced the many frustrations of Acrobat - by default, Reader cannot fill in a form unless it was created using Acrobat Pro >8.0 and has specifically enabled usage rights. That's fine and it basically works (except then Pro users can't save their data - WTF?).
Because I am getting frustrated, I would ideally like to avoid Adobe products altogether (that is on the design side, for the users Reader is still a necessity or I would just do it as a db-backed web form). I'm wondering if anyone has has good experiences with alternatives? Either software libraries or products?
Thanks!
EDIT - Thanks, matt b - I'd seen iText before but didn't know it could create forms. Unfortunately, it looks like Reader cannot save filled-in data to the forms generated by iText (or generated by OO Writer). I've got the nasty feeling that what I want is fundamentally impossible except using Adobe's own rights management tools. If there are other ideas. I'd love to hear them.
You can create fillable form PDFs using OpenOffice.org as well as LibreOffice.
To create the initial form elements in the *.odt documents, enable the View --> Toolbars --> Form Controls tools, which allow you to add clickable checkboxes + radiobuttons, fillable text fields, pushbuttons and some more to the page(s).
When you're finished with your document, use File --> Export as PDF with the checkbox Create PDF form enabled.
Now your PDF form will be editable (and saveable!) with any non-Adobe PDF viewer.
NOTE, however: Adobe uses an own proprietary way to create and fill PDF forms. Adobe Reader does only support to fill PDF forms which were created by an Adobe product (and which have been assigned 'extended rights' so Reader can indeed save the formdata alongside the document).
Adobe Reader will not work with PDF forms you created with OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice ('work' in the sense of: 'allows you to fill+save the form data'.). The technical mechanism behind this is that Adobe digitally sign their form documents with their own key (which is known to the Adobe Reader, and which you agreed to not reverse engineer when you accepted the Adobe Reader EULA...). --
This means:
Non-Adobe PDF Readers will not be able to 'fill+save' forms created with Adobe products (they can 'fill+print' them however).
Adobe PDF readers will refuse to 'fill+save' forms created with non-Adobe products (they will 'fill+print' them however).
The latter two points will be true for all the tools and utilities mentioned in the other answers to this question. If I'm mistaken here, please let me know in a comment...
iText is pretty much the standard in the java-world for generating PDF files programmatically. Perhaps it can also be used to create PDFs with forms in them as you would like?
The open source page layout tool Scribus has a bunch of features oriented to creating interactive PDF forms. I haven't personally used them, but they appear reasonably complete and are covered by the tutorial.
Scribus is worth knowing about if you ever need to do serious page layout in any case.
XSL FO is some thing we used to create PDF files out of existing form data. Unless you want the fillable pdf to be sent out the client, this is a valid option.
IText lets you create Annotations (there are essentially 3 types of 'interactive' components - forms (old style FDF and new XFA) and Annotations. Acrobat and lots of third party tools should let you modify the Annotations values.
There is also a DotNet version of IText called ISharp - both are freeand extremely powerful.
CutePDF Pro allows you to turn a PDF into an interactive form.
Foxit reader allows you to save any pdf with the filled in fields.
I recently dabbled with Scribus. I found it to be an excellent tool if one has enough time to configure and play around with it. I highly recommend it. Wufoo is also very good.
I am not a fan of Acrobat / Adobe. A software should make my life easier not challenge me at every step.
If you search the net with these keywords - FREE FORM CREATOR and you can add the word HTML5.
You will find an array of sites where you can log online and all your clients can have their separate login, fill in data and the form remains in the Cloud and declutter your hard drive. All stakeholders can access the form and edit at anytime. The account can be used as a folder for your business. These forms can be accessed on any device and any platform.
Many of these forms are HTML5 driven, they are so beautiful and fluid. Keep away from macros, they carry viruses.
www.homebasedofficeservices.com