I would like to do a task that is quite simple on other OS, but it is not so trivial on iOS. Namely, I want to create file and open it in Numbers.
I can preview the file with UIDocumentInteractionController and then offer it to user that he/she opens it.
THis seems to me quite a reasonable solution. However, I need to offer proper file format. I suppose CSV and XLS would be reasonable to implement and it would most probably work, but I would still like to do it in native Numbers format if possible. However, I can't find any info about this file format.
Basically, this task is about exporting data to another app and then working further with them.
I don't know of a library that can create native Numbers files. There are hoewever some libraries that allow creating XLS files. Since Numbers fully supports XLS, this is probably the way to go.
There is a comercial library available that might work on the iPhone (costs $200): http://www.libxl.com/
As for free XLS libraries, I only know xlwt, a Python module. You could set up a webservice that creates an XLS file for your app, using xlwt on the server side.
If you want to pass information to Numbers, you can probably also use CSV files. If you use CSV files, you must be aware of some things. There are two kinds of CSV files: the comma separated version (used in english speaking countries) and the semicolon separated (used in continental europe).
The comma separated CSV files look for example like this:
"ID","First Name","Last Name","Salary"
1,"John","Malkovich",3400.20
2,"Fred","Astaire",2000.60
The second kind of CSV files are semicolon separated and use a comma as decimal mark. They look like this:
"ID";"First Name";"Last Name";"Salary"
1;"John";"Malkovich";3400,20
2;"Fred";"Astaire";2000,60
On the Macintosh, Numbers expects a different format depending on the Region setting. If you have your Region set to the US, it will expect the first kind. If you choose Germany, it will expect the second kind.
I don't know what kind of files Numbers on the iPad expects.
Another alternative would be using copy and paste. Try to copy tab separated text into the clipboard.
I hope this may help you. I've contacted libxl team and they responded with the link to the demo version of their iPhone library: http://www.libxl.com/download/libxl-iphone.zip
Related
I'd like to merge at least 2 PDF files into one while preserving all the form elements in the original PDFs. The form elements include text fields, radio buttons, check boxes, drop down menus and others. Please have a look at this sample PDF file with forms:
http://foersom.com/net/HowTo/data/OoPdfFormExample.pdf
Now try to merge it with any other arbitrary PDF file.
Can you do it?
EDIT: As for the implementation, I'd ideally prefer a command line solution on a linux plattform using open source tools such as 'ghostscript', or any other tool that you think is appropriate to solve this task.
Of course, everybody is welcome to supply any working solution to this problem, including a coded solution that involves writing a script which makes some API calls to a pdf-processing library. However, I'd suggest to take the path of least resistance first (CMD Solution).
Best Regards
EDIT #2: Well there are indeed several CMD tools that merge PDFs. However, these tools don't seem to, AFAIK, to preserve the forms in the original PDFs! These tools appear to simply just concatenate the printouts of all those PDFs into a single Printout, which is then presented as a single PDF.
Furthermore, If you printout a PDF file with forms into a file, you lose all the forms in it. This clearly not what I'm looking for.
I have found success using pdftk, which is an open-source software that runs on linux and can be called from your terminal.
To concatenate multiple pdfs into one (and preserve form-fillable elements), you can use the following command:
pdftk input1.pdf input2.pdf cat output output-file.pdf
I am currently working on a simple tower defense game for iOS (using objective-c), which contains several maps/levels. However, as it is now, each map consists of an image file and a .plist file with information. My question is: is there any way I could create a custom file type (for example, *.map) that contains both the image and the information from the plist?
If this is possible, how do I implement this?
Thanks in advance!
You have several good choices for that:
The simplest solution would be grouping the related files in subfolders: rather than having xyz.map file, you could have an xyz sub-folder, and reference the files out of it. You would not need to use any additional libraries for this, and you would be able to use the same name for all your image files and all your level files, because they would be in separate folders.
You can make a zip archive with the files that you would like to combine, and unzip it before use. Here is a link to an answer referencing a library to do it.
You can use a tar format - here is a list to an answer referencing a library that supports it. You would be able to use tar utility on OS-X to group images with plists on your workstation.
Finally, you can define a format of your own: store the length of the first file in the first four bytes, then store the content of the first file, and then the second. You would need to write a utility for combining the two files into one. This sounds like the hardest choice to implement.
I sincerely apologize if this isn't the proper forum to discuss this, but I wasn't sure where to go or what would be the best option.
Basically, I'm trying to find a database friendly list of veteran affairs hospitals. The closest thing that I've been able to find is www.va.gov/ofcadmin/docs/CATB.pdf as it has all the information I'm looking for:
Region
Address
City in a separate column
Zip Code in a separate column
State
Facility # (also known as StationID)
VISN
Symbol
I've tried exporting that PDF out into CSV but it's a complete nightmare to get working. So, I was curious if anyone had any ideas or insights into how I could accomplish this task.
First, here's a CSV file containing the data found in CATB.pdf. The very first line contains the column headers, and the rest of the file contains the contents.
http://tmp.alexloney.com/CATB.csv
Now, for the more detailed explanation...I took the PDF you provided a link to, converted it to an HTML document using Adobe Acrobat, then I used a lot of Regular Expressions to parse the file and clean it up. Once the file was cleaned up enough, I was able to write a program to parse through the remainder of the file, grab the state and region, and spit it all out in a nicely formatted CSV.
Hope that helps you!
I believe that PDFILL has an option in it that will convert a PDF file to Excell. Once in Excell you should have no problem converting to a CSV file.
An iPhone app which I am creating generates reports from a Core Data database as a CSV file, which can then be emailed so that the user may use that data elsewhere outside of the app. I would also like to offer the ability to generate the same reports as a PDF file (of course, with nicer formatting) allowing the user to immediately print the report rather than having to jump through several hoops as with the CSV file - i.e. open in another application (e.g. Excel, Numbers) then reformat the columns (so they are wide enough for printing), bold the headings, etc.
Essentially, I want to provide the PDF file so that the user is immediately given a nicely formatted report, and they only need to export the CSV file if they wish to do data manipulation and need a format which is editable.
I was thinking that the easiest method would be taking the CSV file and the converting this into a PDF file, which would be the same as the CSV except would incorporate nicer formatting (such as a tabular layout) rather than the simple comma-separated format of the CSV file. I have been unable to find any ready-made classes for this purpose (to avoid reinventing the wheel) and I am unsure how to approach this since I have limited experience with this aspect of the SDK. Any suggestions or pointers in the right direction would be much appreciated.
You have two different problems:
Read CSV data into some structure in memory
Turn some structure in memory into a PDF
Aaron Saunders has posted some links for step 2, so here's a link for step 1:
http://github.com/davedelong/CHCSVParser
That's a CSV parser I wrote that will turn your CSV file into an NSArray of NSArrays of NSStrings.
Does anyone know of a free Perl program (command line preferable), module, or anyway to search and replace text in a PDF file without using it like an editor.
Basically I want to write a program (in Perl preferably) to automate replacing certain words (e.g. our old address) in a few hundred PDF files. I could use any program that supports command line arguments. I know there are many modules on CPAN that manipulate or create pdfs but they don't have (that I've seen) any sort of simple search and replace.
Thanks in advance for any and all advice!!!
Take a look at CAM::PDF. More specifically the changeString method.
How did you generate those PDFs in the first place? Search-and-replace in the original sources and re-generate PDFs seems to be more viable. Direct editing PDFs can be very difficult, and I'm not aware of any free tools that can do it easily.