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.
Related
The complete output text file is hundreds of lines long, with relevant nuclear cross sections and a plethora of other data that I do not need for this particular problem. I am trying to extract the columns of data under "BURNUP" and the first "K-INF" from the file I attached. I am trying to extract this data and place it into a separate file. I am a newbie, and have a similar perl script from a professor. I have tried to adapt it to the information I am looking for but the only result I am receiving are the 2 print statements. Any suggestions?
I'm trying to write a MATLAB function that processes a file and writes a report on that file. The report will contain numbers, strings, tables, and images.
After looking at MATLAB's documentation, I can only find functions that save individual items to a file. For example, print saves a plot, write saves a table, etc. How do I create a single file that contains many of these items (e.g. a PDF with images, tables, and text)?
You can use print with the -append option to write multiple pages to a PostScript file in sequence, and then convert the ps to pdf. Using Matlab's handle graphics system, it is possible (if tedious) to design each print page in detail, arrange elements, etc.
However, if your document is going to be really complex, I think it would be better to generate the pdf in another way. One approach would be to write LaTeX code using lots of fprintfs and compile the file using pdflatex.
Btw., I'm not aware of a Matlab function write that generates a pdf.
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.
I want to create a Excel supported file which contains strings and images programmatically. I tried to create a .csv file, but I am not able to .csv file with both string and image.
There are many possibilities. The easiest way is to create CSV-Files but you have to take care which seperators excel uses. For checking that you should create a spreadsheet in excel and save it as csv and take a look into that file using any text-editor.
Another approach is to use SpreadsheetML and here a link to the msdn XML Spreadsheet Reference
Otherwise just create a simple xlsx-file with excel, unzip that file and take a look into that the unziped files.
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