I am new to Orbeon Form and would like to use it. However, I had tried the Form examples on Orbeon Form Web Site and input some of data in Thai Language. Yes, It can be input data in the fields with “Thai Language”. But when I try to generate “PDF”. The Thai Language Data cannot be displayed.
Can Orbeon X-Forms Support “Thai Language” for inputting Data in the Fields ?
Do I need to use “Professional version” in order to get “Thai Language” to work and display on PDF generation ?
Can “Orbeon X-Form” be able to save Data Locally at the workstation (in case the forms are complicated to fill-in, and need several input time to finish?
This is probably due to the fact that the PDF is lacking an adequate font. Since September 2011 builds, there are properties to specify font embedding, for example:
<property as="xs:string"
name="oxf.fr.pdf.font.path.vera"
value="/path/to/DejaVuSans.ttf"/
For more information, see the documentation. Embedding a specific font with Thai characters might do the trick, although to be fair I haven't tried Thai specifically.
This should work equally well with both Orbeon Forms CE and PE.
You can do this by adding the "Save locally" button to your forms, which is done by setting a property in your properties-local.xml. This will enable users to save an HTML file on their local machine. The HTML file contains all the information they entered so far: when they reopen it, they are taken back to the form on your side, with the data they entered so far "pre-filled".
You can go through this link for internationlization of Orbeon Forms
http://wiki.orbeon.com/forms/how-to/logic/i18n
There is an example given too with multiple languages reflecting on a same form.
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.
I have come across a scenario where I have to read html data from database and display it in pdf reports. This html data also contains table structure <table></table> tags and other html element inside it. Previously we used jasper reports for our reporting needs but recently as we came to know that the above functionality is not supported in jasper, I wanted to know which reporting tool can be used so that it can be incorporated with servoy. Does birt provide this functionality?
AFAIK none of the well-known reporting tools does support this, although in BIRT it works "somehow" - but not good enough to be usable.
The reason for this is simple, I think: A reporting tool would have to incorporate a complete browser engine like WebKit or others to achieve this, because it would have to "understand" the structure for its page-breaking algorithm.
Yes, BIRT has a text element where we can set the display type to HTML. If the html table is in a dataset field you will just have to include it in the expression of the text using "value-of" tag, something like this:
<VALUE-OF format="HTML">row["htmlTableField"]</VALUE-OF>
PDF format is taking such html elements into account, including most of simple style settings such background color, text-align, borders etc.
Usually the reports render just fine with html.
There are some tricks to displaying html correctly in BIRT.
You may use a Dynamic Text element and set to html or auto.
Here are some tricks to handling free form text..
Make sure your xml is valid, I recommend replacing line breaks or you may catch a scenario where the rptdocument will not export.
Also, if possible keep these in auto layout, when using run + render. The page breaks may actually be calculated once on run and again on render. You might experience breaking issues with fixed. The page may attempt to display all the html prior to breaking a page when using the RUN() phase, in web viewer or the rptdocument. Then when rendering to pdf the the breaks are applied differently, with fixed layout.
I'm developing a CMS, and I'm trying to figure out which rich text editor (if any) I want to use.
The content is stored in a structured form on the server. Let's call it the "canonical form". It is not a simple HTML or markdown page, but a multi-part structure where each part is stored as individual records in the database.
The server reads the canonical form and sends it to the client. The client transforms the canonical form into HTML. I now want to let the user edit the content, and save it back to the server in canonical form.
I'm not sure a rich text editor will do the trick. It seems most RTE's give you HTML, leaving it up to you to parse the HTML and save it. The problem is that the conversion of canonical to HTML is one-way. The canonical form is different enough from HTML that the transformation can't be readily reversed.
So I need some kind of intimate interaction with the editor. I need to track all the things the editor does (select, copy, paste, drag-n-drop, splitting blocks, merging blocks, etc.) as the editor is doing it, so that I can maintain the canonical form in parallel with the displayed HTML.
Is there anything out there that will do this? I'm looking at TinyMCE, CKEditor, etc.
It sounds like you're probably going to need logic that converts content into canonical form on an editor get operation, and the inverse on an editor set operation.
Textbox.io supports the idea of filters for content. You could possibly tie this in with something like Markdown-js to get your canonical format.
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.
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.
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