My problem is rather simple:
I need a tool to merge some medium complex JSON input data inside a template PDF.
Then based on the data:
Some sections of the template could be replicated.
Some sections may be deleted and the gap created should disappear.
Tables could be filled by N elements without messing the formatting.
Tables could have "merged cells inside"
Also templates should be easily adjustable without re-writing the code, this means they could be: editable PDF, Word files, Spreadsheets, some tool's templates... (..html?)
In all the tools i tried (a lot! :(( ), one or more of the points above was always a nightmare.
So far i tried:
latex -> pdflatex -> pdf: this probably simply reduced my life expectation by 1.. 1 and a 1/2 years. Unfortunately the most powerful tool because.. Latex? anyway not maintainable at all
pdfminer\pdfjs\whatever npm pkg.. : coding always ends up in a low level mess or huge workarounds.
google sheets -> pdf: APIs are kind of hard, and anyway are cell\row based so it's difficult to manage dynamic sections
pdfgeneratorapi.com : basically what i needed with a rich editor in it, but formatting and aligning tables is bugged so results are always ugly. Also things like "merged cells" are not possible.
So question would be: is there a tool or package out there in 2022 capable of handling all these requirements at once?
I would recommend using LaTeX for your PDF generation requirements. LaTeX comes with a huge number of available packages and chances are that someone has already solved your issue in LaTeX.
Specifically, DynamicDocs API by ADVICEment might be a good option for your requirements. DynamicDocs is JSON to PDF API based on LaTeX. Here are some features:
Ready-made JSON to PDF templates (no need to understand LaTeX)
Ability to write your own template in LaTeX and merge JSON to PDF using the R language layer, making the templates and their content dynamic
Excel to PDF Add-in (currently in Beta) to generate PDFs based on data in Excel
Each account is given a FREE plan with a limited number of monthly API calls
Disclaimer: I am involved in developing DynamicDocs API.
Related
Problem Statement
I joined in the middle of the project and circumstances (let me cut short) means I need to understand the entire flow of the Bespoke SAAS application.
What I am expecting:
I need options and steps to extract this application which has about 25 Menus, and each has many sub menus and each submenu has 5-6 different iframes with many elements.
I need a way to extract this entire tree structure into excel, JSON, and XML so I can easily search, analyze and use each one in my process mapping.
What I tried
I tried to extract the entire page and tried to use Regular expressions and use Python using anaconda but it is a huge work and not feasible because of the complicity of iframes and a lot of elements in each frame. Also not being python expertise, I may not do a good job there.
I tried to extract this via Power BI but the application is not opening up using the web as I typed all the login information
Please can you advise on how to proceed easily?
Note: This is a restricted environment except for Anaconda python and notepad++ I do not have approval for any other software.
Many thanks
I have literally hundreds of slides created with python-pptx. Many of these slides have charts I would like to use in a docx file. So what I would like to do is use python-docx to import these slides/charts into a docx file. Is that possible?
No, not with the current python-pptx or python-docx APIs.
Such a thing is possible of course, since the Word application will allow you to "paste" charts from PowerPoint and in fact the charts themselves are specified in DrawingML, an XML vocabulary that is shared between PowerPoint, Word, and Excel.
But to make this work with Python, you'd have to dig quite deep into the internals of both python-pptx and python-docx (although their architectures are much the same). You would probably also need to learn more about the respective XML vocabularies than you really wanted to know. So you might want to consider alternate approaches such as using win32com support for this sort of thing, especially if you are running on Windows and this is a one-time job and does not need to be hosted on a server for ongoing use.
If you thought you did want to tackle it, a good first step might be to inspect the XML related to a PowerPoint chart (located in both the slide and the chart-parts of the PPTX package) and also inspect the corresponding XML that appears in a Word (.docx) file that includes a chart. That will give you an idea of what needs to come over from the PPTX package, what transformations it may need to undergo (namespace changes perhaps) and where it would need to be added into the DOCX package, including updating relationship files and perhaps updating certain ID values to make them unique in the target package.
I am trying to extract data [price, information, and number] from PDF (I have like more than 10 000 PDF so the free trial of the website won't work).
Here is one example of PDF I get :
I tried it in Python (beginner on this kind of task and on Python also) with several packages like PyPDF2, pdfx and so on, but I only get the Text like this
with PyPDF2 :
So It's possible to extract the price, the number, and information but I have different format of pdf so it is not possible to just with the text and some algorithms extract the information.
What I want to do, and it is possible because a lot of websites are doing it and make people pay for it. I want to read it in a vertical way and convert the data extracted in XML/JSON or simply a dataset.
I want to read the document per columns and not by line
Is there a way to do it in python or other languages?
First let me tell you that this is not an easy problem to solve since PDF files in the wild tend to be quite diverse in layouts. I can suggest trying an open source project that works really good for extracting information from tables in PDF files. It is called Tabula, you can get it at https://tabula.technology.
Tabula is going to detect tables on each page and export the content as CSV format. Once you have it in CSV it should be easier to get the information using Python. Please note that the CSV layout depends on the table layout in the PDF, meaning that you may need to create several functions to extract the information correctly.
Tabula is not perfect but it should work with most PDF files, for those that do not work you may need to extract the information manually.
I'm working on automating our company invoicing system. Currently all data is stored in our local MySQL database and someone manually updates an excel spreadsheet and then merges this data into a MS Word template. The goal is to automate this process so that the invoice can be generated from our intranet website as a PDF.
My original plan was to create a template in HTML/CSS and use wkhtmltopdf to generate the PDF but I ran into problems with getting a repeatable header and footer on each page. thead and tfoot aren't supported by Webkit and the fix suggested in this other question does not seem to work either.
So I then stumbled on using XML and XSL-FO, the latter I know nothing about. Is this the best path to take? Are there any libraries or utilities out there that will make converting my HTML+CSS into XML+XSL-FO easier? Are there any other alternatives I'm overlooking?
EDIT
Currently the server is CentOS Linux with a MySQL database. All other code is currently in PHP currently but that may change as the whole system is being revamped. Linux and MySQL will almost certainly remain, though.
For your requirement, XSL-FO might just do the trick. It is much cleaner to produce the pdf's directly from the data, then going the cumbersome html path, unless you need to display the html as well, then you might consider converting from html to pdf, but it will always be messy.
You can get xml results from mysql quite easily (mysql --xml) and then you write one (or several) xsl-fo stylesheet for the data. then, you cannot only produce pdfs, but also postscript files or rtf's with some processors.
XSL-FO has its limitations tho, but for your situation, it should suffice.
I admit, the learning curve can be steep, and maintaining xslt-stylesheets can get very tiring, but as you start knowing more about it, you end up writing less code.
another possibility is to do the whole thing in e.g. java or c# - send select statements and loop the results and iteratively build the pdf using a library like iText.
You could try JODReports or Docmosis as less-code intensive options. You supply Word or OpenOffice Writer documents to act as templates and use these engines to manipulate/populate the templates then spit out the documents in the format(s) you require. This may mean your existing Word-templates can be used directly which should save you some effort/time.
iText is another library that will let you build and pump out PDFs from code. It's pretty good.
If you cloud use ASP.NET for web you can use free ReportViewer library and designer for automated of publishing PDF-s.
Here is some references:
http://gotreportviewer.com
http://weblogs.asp.net/srkirkland/archive/2007/10/29/exporting-a-sql-server-reporting-services-2005-report-directly-to-pdf-or-excel.aspx
If you're OK using .NET and C#, you could use DotPdf from Atalasoft (obligatory disclaimer: I work for Atalasoft and wrote most of DotPdf). The Generating namespace is geared for exactly what you're trying to do: automate report generation. From the very basics, you could just create docs directly with the toolkit or you can create template documents that have unpopulated text fields that you can reload and fill later (see here and here for examples).
Note: I realize this question has already been asked (with a ruby slant) here: Creating on-demand, print-quality PDFs (preferably in Ruby if feasible). BUT there was no decent answer IMHO.
So as you may have guessed, I am looking to find the best approach to producing HIGH QUALITY, print ready PDF documents programmatically. Our requirements need us to be able to have design documents that define place holders for dynamic content like images and text i.e. some kind of template mechanism.
The suggestion has been to use Adobe's InDesign server, but this seems like an expensive solution not to mention a little overkill for our need.
Are there any alternative, cheaper and more fitting solutions out there? The language of the solution doesn't really matter, just as long as it can be executes on a Windows box.
My suggestion would be to look at XSL-FO or thereabouts...
You create an XML doc that describes what you want and there are various libraries and toolkits (I've used XEP from RenderX) that will convert said XML into PDF.
In real terms what we did was take a large lump of data in XML format, use XSLT - templates in effect - to convert the data to formating objects which XEP renders up into something (a 500 page hotel directory with auto-generated TOC and Index) that has been consumed quite happily by at least three different commercial printers. We did some other smaller documents too from time to time.
Downside with this is that its not even remotely a WYSIWYG solution - you're effectively compiling "source code" to get PDF out the back. Upside is that the base technologies are reasonably generic even if the specific toolkits may be a bit less so.
You can convert XML templates to PDFs with Prince.
Prince is a computer program that
converts XML and HTML into PDF
documents. Prince can read many XML
formats, including XHTML and SVG.
Prince formats documents according to
style sheets written in CSS.
I have and also know many people that have had much success with ReportLab an open source Python PDF library (http://www.reportlab.org/rl_toolkit.html).
Its extremely easy to use and very quick to get started. So worth trying out.
I don't know why no one has suggested using LaTeX for this. It's an extremely popular open format for document design and not hard to set up a template that you can fill in text or image content. While the reference implementation of LaTeX runs as a standalone program, if that sounds like too many moving parts for you there are wrapper libraries for Python and other languages you can call via an API.
Java language and JasperReports
Java: iText
C#: iTextSharp
depends on what you want to publish, but take a look at Pentaho reporting
http://reporting.pentaho.org/
rinohtype is an open-source document processor that is capable of producing high-quality print-ready PDF documents. You can use one of the built-in document templates (book, article) or define your own template. The look of document elements can be configured by means of CSS-like style sheets. The contents of your document can be parsed from reStructuredText or CommonMark files, or you can build the document tree programmatically.
Full disclosure: I am the author of rinohtype.