I have an iOS 5 application that sends a job to the print que. I have all of that code working fine and I'm using the HTML formatter to create the document (UIMarkupTextPrintFormatter). Right now I have a very basic HTML string that I am using for testing but want to flesh it out further.
Which HTML engine is used to interpret the HTML string that is passed to UIMarkupTextPrintFormatter? Or, in other words, what is the best way for me to test my HTML string outside of XCode? Can I just create a text file and then view it in Safari? Would that give me the best approximation of what it will look like when printed from iOS?
How fancy can I get with the HTML in the UIMarkupTextPrintFormatter? I assume that I'll have to use all inline styles? Are there some examples out there of HTML strings that are sent to UIMarkupTextPrintFormatter to create rich documents? I just want to get an idea of what's possible with this combination.
You can test iOS printing in the Simulator, using the iOS Printer Simulator app. The UIMarkupTextPrintFormatter will render through WebKit. Imagine the HTML string is a single-page HTML document. That is basically the limitations of the formatter, although I believe you can also link to external style sheets and images too.
Related
I have been in the process of converting my Android/Java app into iOS/Swift, and have run into an issue regarding table generation.
The app displays a list of content pulled from a web source as html strings, and displays these in a UITableView (RecyclerView on Android). Creating an NSMutableAttributedString with NSDocumentTypeDocumentAttribute:NSHTMLTextDocumentType works fine for basic html formatting (bold, italics, lists, etc), but I need to render tables as well.
In my Android app, I created blocks of content split at tags, and if it was a table, populated a TableView and inserted it into the correct place in the text using a LinearLayout.
The cells are programmatically generated in Swift, so I pre-process the HTML when pulled from the web and store the NSMutableAttributedStrings in an array along with the estimated heights in order to make scrolling smooth. I ran across the NSTextTable in Apple's documentation, but cannot seem to figure out how to use this class, and whether they can be embedded in an NSMutableAttributedString in order to access the table later.
If I'm totally misunderstanding what that class does, please let me know.
I'm writing relatively complex iOS app that is very text heavy.
The text is also heavily formatted. It has lots of color, size, font, and spacing changes, as well bulleted lists and other text features you'd expect to see in a very rich website.
The text is displayed on about 40 different views. Some of which display a lot of text, others a little. There is no one template that all the pages follow. (There are some that are similar, but that's not the point.)
Lastly, the text is constantly being changed and updated by an editorial team during development, not so much after release. The text has to be stored on the device, downloading files is not an option.
My question is, what is the best way to store and then render all this text in an iOS App?
My approach
Store all the text content and formatting info in an html file and use
[[NSAttributedString alloc] initWithFileURL:htmlDoc
options:#{
NSDocumentTypeDocumentAttribute:NSHTMLTextDocumentType}
documentAttributes:&attrDict
error:&error];
to create a NSAttributed string and use that to populate UITextViews.*
*Note: I would do some more work before creating the UITextViews. First I would parse it to find the appropriate page number [[Page:1.3]] and then parse the elements in that section [[header]], [[side_scroller]], etc...
I like this approach for two main reasons:
It created a separate copy document that contained all the text
and formatting info.
I'm the only iOS developer, but we have a couple front-end
developers. So when we get slammed with changes that need to be done
in 3.45 minutes, I could have some of the guys help me make the
changes, without having to know all the nuances of UIFont and
related classes. Occasionally, the editors could even make the
changes themselves :)
Minor reasons for liking this approach:
The text can vary so much per page, that creating a new UIFont + Plist entry to store the formatting info seems like a bigger pain than having everything in a .html document. (I could be wrong about this.)
Project managers will inevitably say: "Make this word a little bigger," "This word looks strange, add italics," and "Make everything purple!" HTML/CSS seems like a more flexible solution for quickly implementing these requests.
Downsides of this approach:
NSAttributedString picks up 99% of the HTML attributes I threw at it. It did not pick bullet spacing changes in unordered lists <ul>.
Plists are more performant.
Here are some other approaches I considered:
Plist + UIFont
RTF Document - Originally started with this, but found it hid a lot of what was going on and NSAttributedString wouldn't pick up some of the changes.
XML
Any advice or input would very appreciated.
Notes:
iPad app,
iOS 7,
No Internet Connectivity,
Xcode 5
What I did to store styled text in an iOS app was to write a Mac OS command line tool that opens RTF files and converts them to attributed strings (It's a 1-line call in Mac OS, but not supported in iOS for some reason.) I then use NSCoding to save the attributed strings as binary data, with a special .DATA filetype.
I created a custom UITextView category with a method that knows how to load the text view's attributed text from my custom filetype.
I created a build rule in my project that treats RTF files as source files in a build step and the .DATA filetype as the output, and copies the .DATA files into the build project.
Now, all I have to do is add an RTF file to my project the build process inserts the .DATA version of the styled text into the executable.
The Xcode editor knows how to edit RTF files, so you can edit them right in place in the IDE, OR you can edit them in TextEdit or any editor that supports RTF files.
There are a few things you can put in an RTF that aren't supported in UITextViews. (I don't remember what those are offhand. Sorry.)
I find styled WYSIWYG text much easier to deal with than HTML. You just edit the text, and the build process picks up the changes.
It worked beautifully. Plus, binary NSCoding output is a whole lot more compact than HTML.
I would recommend using web view. It can open files in resource bundle.
You can disable all the links in HTML by implementing delegate method shouldStartLoadWithRequest to return NO.
You might also want to set dataDetectorTypes to UIDataDetectorTypeNone.
That will disable auto link detection in web view
I just want to automate a web application, where that application parses the HTML page and pulls all the HTML Tags inner text based on some condition like if we have a tag called Span Example has given whose class="spanclass_1"
This is span tag...
which has particular class id. so that app parses and pulls that span into it.
And here the main pain area is, I should not use the developer code to automate that same parsing the HTML.
I want to automate that parsing done correctly, simply by using the parsed data which is shown in UI.
Any help, would be great.
Appreciating your time reading this.
(Note span tag is not shown)
Thanks buddies.
not enough details.
is this html page just a file in local filesystem on it is internet webpage?
do u have access to pages? can u modify it ? if answer yes, that just add javascript to page which will extract data and post to server.
if answer not, than it depends on language u use to programm.
Find good framework to parse html. load page parse it and extract data. Several situation can be there.
Worse scenario - page generated on client side using js.
Best scenario - page is in xhtml mode( u are lucky. any xml parser will help to build dom and extract data)
So so - page is simple html format (try several html parser to find most suitable for u)
I know there is a list of similar questions but all handle pages without user interaction (static even though some js may be there).
Let's say we've a page the user can interact (e.g. svg than changes, or html tables with drilldown - content changes). Those interactions will change the page. Same happens in stackoverflow when entering the question...
The idea is adding a button, "convert to pdf" taking the state of the html and sending to the user back a pdf version (we've a Java server).
Using the print of the browser is not the answer I'm looking for :-).
Is this a stick in the moon ?
You would have to store the parameters that generate the HTML view (i.e. what the user clicks on, what selections they make, etc). If you can have a list of parameters that generate the HTML view, you can have a method which accepts the list of parameters (JSON post?), generates the HTML view and passes it to your PDF generating routine. I'm not too familiar with Java libraries for this purpose, but PHP has TCPDF can take html output to basically generate a PDF for you. Certainly, there are Java libraries which will allow you to do the same thing, or you can use the parameters to get a list of rows/arrays which can be iterated over and output using the PDF library of your choice.
Both iTextPDF and Aspose.PDF would allow you to do that (I've seen them used in two different projects), but there is no magic and you will have to do some work.
The steps are roughly:
Get (as a string) the part of the document which you want to print with jQuery or innerHTML
Call a service on the server side to convert this to PDF
[Serverside] Use a whitlist - based tool to clean up the hmtl (unless you want to be hacked). JSoup is great for that.
[Serverside] Use IText or Aspose API to create the PDF from the HTML (this is not trivial, you will have to read the doc)
Download the document
I'd also recommend DocRaptor, an HTML to PDF API built by my company, Expected Behavior.
DocRaptor uses Prince XML to generate PDFs, and thus produces higher quality results than similar products.
Adding PDF generation to your own web application using our service is as simple as making an HTTP POST request to our server.
Here's a link to DocRaptor's home page:
DocRaptor
And a link to our API documentation:
DocRaptor API documentation
How can I display properly formatted text from an NSString, that just happens to be HTML. The html is coming from the stack overflow API.
You can create a NSAttributedString from HTML. You then draw it as you would draw any other NSAttributedString.
If your tags are accurate and you are programming for OS X (or iPhone 4.0+), you can use NSAttributedString's – initWithHTML:documentAttributes:, and then draw that directly.
Unfortunately, the iPhone OS' UIKit does not contain NSAttributedString pre-4.0. The current recommendation from the developer docs is to use a UIWebView, which sucks. An alternative might be the Three20 library, which contains TTStyledText -- that looks like it might do the job.
You could have a WebView, and tell the WebView's mainFrame to load the HTML string.
If you meant to ask about Cocoa Touch, UIWebView has an equivalent method for you.