I am trying to set up a label template for a Zebra printer that has 4 variables containing different pieces of information, FN1, FN2, FN3, and FN4. These 4 variables are printed to text and barcode fields on the label, however I also want to concatenate them together to create a single data matrix containing the data in all 4 variables.
I have tried inserting line breaks using \& as suggested on page 144 of the documentation but this does not seem to have any effect. The code for the field data I'm trying to use is shown below.
^FH\^FN1\&^FN2\&^FN3\&^FN4^FS
Only the content of the last variable in the list (FN4, in that case) is encoded into the data matrix, the rest are ignored. I suspect I'm missing something fairly straightforward, but have not been able to find any articles relating to this exact problem.
For anyone else looking for this kind of solution, I have received confirmation from Zebra that this is unfortunately not currently (as at 01/02/2023) possible in ZPL. You should be able to implement it with ZBI, but this is quite a different approach and requires compatible hardware.
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I am writing a script, that extracts different types of data from different kind of custom log files.
But before I continue to write, I want to determine in what output format / platform I want it to be, so it is displayed properly or it can be read properly.
examples:
sometimes it is certain lines of text with an important word in it
sometimes it is a block of text between a start and end phrase
sometimes it are data points, which i then want to visualize better in a line chart
....
OR it is a combination of those
At first i thought i write it so that it is in a markdown file format, so i can for instance create fold able blocks, so that i just unfold the part that i want to read.
But markdown is not versatile. Meaning I cant create line charts or other kinds of stuff (thinking about the future)
So know I put the different types of data in different type of output formats and visualize them in an HTML file.
meaning, the blocks of text in a markdown file, which I then import though a java-script markdown viewer
the data points, I create a line chart through a java-script chart
.....
HOWEVER, I am not sure that this is the best/correct way to go .....
What is your advice ?
I'm using data from synthea and it looks like most (all?) of the given and family names I'm getting back end with a three digit number (e.g. Gregg522). Is this part of the design of synthea or am I parsing the data incorrectly. A snippet of the json I'm getting back is shown below. If this is part of the design, what is the motivation of ending the name with a number (I would think this would make the data less realistic).
Yes, they generally do. It is sometimes nice to be able to see that the patients are fake/synthetic ones. However, this is a setting you can change: In the synthea.properties file, look for the setting "append_numbers_to_person_names" and set it to false.
I am generating and storing PDFs in a database.
The pdf data is stored in a text field using Convert.ToBase64String(pdf.ByteArray)
If I generate the same exact PDF that already exists in the database, and compare the 2 base64strings, they are not the same. A big portion is the same, but it appears about 5-10% of the text is different each time.
What would make 2 pdfs different if both were generated using the same method?
This is a problem because I can't tell if the PDF was modified since it was last saved to the db.
Edit: The 2 pdfs visually appear exactly the same when viewing the actual pdf, but the base64string of the bytes are different
Two PDFs that look 100% the same visually can be completely different under the covers. PDF producing programs are free to write the word "hello" as a single word or as five individual letters written in any order. They are also free to draw the lines of a table first followed by the cell contents, or the cell contents first, or any combination of these such as one cell at a time.
If you are actually programmatically creating the PDFs and you create two PDFs using completely identical code you still won't get files that are 100% identical. There's a couple of reasons for this, the most obvious is that PDFs support creation and modification dates. These will obviously change depending on when they are created. You can override these (and confuse everyone else so I don't recommend this) using something like this:
var info = writer.Info;
info.Put(PdfName.CREATIONDATE, new PdfDate(new DateTime(2001,01,01)));
info.Put(PdfName.MODDATE, new PdfDate(new DateTime(2001,01,01)));
However, PDFs also support a unique identifier in the trailer's /ID entry. To the best of my knowledge iText has no support for overriding this parameter. You could duplicate your PDF, change this manually and then calculate your differences and you might get closer to a comparison.
Then there's fonts. When subsetting fonts, producers create a unique internal name based on the original name and an arbitrary selection of six uppercase ASCII letters. So for the font Calibri the font's name could be JLXWHD+Calibri one time and SDGDJT+Calibri another time. iText doesn't support overriding of this because you'd probably do more harm than good. These internal names are used to avoid font subset collisions.
So the short answer is that unless you are comparing two files that are physical duplicates of each other you can't perform a direct comparison on their binary contents. The long answer is that you can tweak some of the PDF entries to remove unique parts for comparison only but you'd probably be doing more work than it would take to just re-store the file in the database.
Currently i'm working on transforming a xml file to delimited seperated file.I was pondering over the idea of representing multiple values of an attribute field..Currently my idea is to represent the values as below:
First Name;Last Name;E-mail id;Description
Fresher;user1;"|email1#abc.com|;|email2#abc.com|";This user joined as fresher.
My question is;Is there is a standard followed for representation of multiple values.?
How is this scenario taken care in common spreadsheet programs available such as Microsoft excel,openoffice calc and lotus notes 123 when imported into .csv file..??
Based on this i want to make changes to my xslt code..
Appreciate any help in this regard..
According to my experiences it is always good to stick to database normalisation standards. There are a lot of information everywhere in the web for further references.
a) When looking in your proposal what I like is to separate each column with semicolon instead of comma. It's easier to import data to any system later especially when you will deal with different (national) standards of number separation symbols
b) However, which I don't like is the 'e-mail' section. There would be a problem in the following areas:
quotation marks are problems- try to avoid them.
don't separate inside e-mail addresses with the same mark as for column separation. Therefore you shouldn't use semicolon there (what I guess- you can have one or few e-mails for each record).
If you can't introduce database normalisation standards I would propose the following small improvements to your idea:
Fresher;user1;email1#abc.com|email2#abc.com;This user joined as fresher
If you provide that kind of data file I think each of vba user would be able to import it to Excel (or any other system) easily and quickly.
I have variable defined as NUMBER type and it has values like 2314514512 how can I add comma to this number so that it appears like 2,314,514,512 without using to_char?
I was able to solve the issue as I did formatting part from the reporting tool before rendering data back to the user.