I have successfully built a two column report in MS-Access (2013, if that matters). What I can't seem to find out, is how to get a separator line between the columns.
I have tried to draw a vertical line in the details area, but this is not working when some fields in the detail area can grow. The line does not grow, and there doesn't seem to be a "grow" option for lines.
What am I missing? If MS-Access does not offer this, is there a way to do this programmatically?
I think your easiest solution is to create an image - about the size of your page - with a vertical line in the middle, then use that image as a page background for your report.
From my experience, the best quality/wheight you can get is when your image is in the EMF (enhanced Meta file) format, a Microsoft vector format.
This is not supported by many tools. I use Inkscape (free) when I need that. And from my limited experience, (free) Inkscape gives better results than (expensive) Illustrator for that use case.
Alternatively, you can create such background image as a Word document, save to PDF, then find an online PDF to EMF converter.
Related
Given a rectangle that represents an area on a Windows screen that contains text, what is the best way to extract the text?
I know that it is possible using OCR, but even after significant pre processing, the quality is really poor.
Getting the Window Text using Win32 API does not always work as well.
Assuming that the text was rendered using a font, is it possible to get it from there?
Any directions would be extremely helpful. Thanks!
Given a rectangle that represents an area on window screen, the best way to extract text is indeed OCR. Use a better OCR library like this one from Microsoft.
The reason getting the window text using Win32 API does not work well is because there may be multiple windows in that rectangle. You will have to find out what all windows the rectangle contains and send a message to get the text for each window. It is not impossible but difficult to do and even if you manage to do that, you will run into issues of text alignment, etc. OCR is your best option.
It does seem possible without using OCR, as NirSoft SysExporter can do this:
https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/sysexp.html
This may be suitable for programmatic use as it can be run from a command line:
Starting from version 1.70, you can export the content of Windows
control from command-line, without displaying any user interface.
You may not be able to target it at a specific rectangle on the screen, but maybe the same result could be achieved by first scraping everything followed by some post-processing.
Further basic info:
SysExporter utility allows you to grab the data stored in standard
list-views, tree-views, list boxes, combo boxes, text-boxes, and
WebBrowser/HTML controls from almost any application running on your
system, and export it to text, HTML or XML file.
...
Known Limitations
SysExporter can export data from most combo boxes, list boxes,
tree-view, and list-view controls, but not from all of them. There are
some applications that use these controls to display data, but the
data itself is not actually stored in the control, but in another
location in the computer's memory. In such cases, SysExporter won't be
able to export the data.
Personally I've used it to grab text from what look like label controls.
The question seems to be weird, but I need to ask this, since I am witnessing a quite interesting output when I compare text as image and graphics as image.
Ideally I am in process of identifying an tool, or algorithm to compare two pdfs, generate output which will highlight the difference between them.
There are possibilities in pdfs, which will have text as image format (legacy text on papers, are converted to pdfs).
and we are doing migration of those legacy pdfs, and finally we are comparing with legacy and converted pdf output.
I am evaluating couple of tools like Adobe dc pro, i-net pdfc and power pdf etc, for comparing two pdfs.
While evaluating, I am able to see graphic images are getting compared(not accurate either) on either side of the pdfs. Where as text as images are completely ignored, unanimously same results in all the tools.
But I am more interested in text as image, since we deal more of legacy text pdfs.
Below, is attached graphic image comparison result, where it could able to capture the differences between the images.
But when I compare text image, differences are not highlighted in the tool.
What I understand from this, text is not compared as image graphics, and tool is completely ignoring the comparison. I would like have clarification whether my assumption is correct.
Secondly, I would like to know how to compare text image in pdfs to generate the differences?.
I'm working for the company that is author of i-net PDFC so I'll answer your first question as well:
Your assumption is correct. i-net PDFC is able to compare images and shapes, but it cannot detect if some content completely changed it's meaning, e.G. a line shape that is used to draw a letter or in your case an image that has to be recognized as text. Recognizing ASCII art as image won't work for the same reason either. Such cases will always be detected as differences even though their visual appearance is similar.
On your second question: Using an OCR conversion tool for one or both documents is a common solution to this problem. A simple image comparison of the compared pages in unlikely to work due to the different font styles and line wrappings in the converted file.
Please note that most OCR applications will use the rendered page images for the recognition. This may lead to incorrect recognition results even if there are no images in the PDF file.
i-net Software is aware of this general issue and an OCR module is currently in development. It'll provide an option to apply the recognition solely to the images in the PDF files.
I've read much about PDF extractions and libraries (as iText) but i just haven't found a solution to extract images and text (with coordinates) from a PDF.
The task is to scan PDF with catalog of products and extract each image. There is an image code printed next to each image and also a list of product codes for products that are shown on the image.
I know that there is no way to extract structured info from a PDF like this but with coordinates of all image and text objects I could write code to identify linked text by its distance from the image. Then I could split text using a RegExp and find out what is a product code, what is an image code etc.
Could you recommend a good and working solution for the task?
Use XPDF (http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/)
It can extract all the characters in the PDF with co-ordinates (pdftotext -bbox [sourcefile] [outputfile]) and also all the images and SVGs in the PDF.
It's open source (GPLv2) and supports a lot of additional extraction functionalities as well.
Several Java libraries can do this. Have you looked at JPedal or PdfBox?
If a commercial library is an option for you, you could try Amyuni PDF Creator .Net or Amyuni PDF Creator ActiveX. You could use the method IacDocument.GetObjectsInRectangle to retrieve all the "graphic objects" of your interest, then use the ObjectType attribute to separate images from text. The library already provides an algorithm for putting close text together. From the documentation:
IacDocument.GetObjectsInRectangle Method
The GetObjectsInRectangle method gets all the objects that are in the specified rectangle.
Usual disclaimer applies.
Several photo management applications (e.g. Picnic on the flickr website, F-Spot on the gnome desktop), has the option to 'autocorrect'/'auto-fix' an image, which seems to adjust the colours in an image to make it look a bit better.
For example, here's a before:
and after
Is there anyway to do this sort of 'automatically adjust the colours to make it look good' on the command line with ImageMagick's tools (or other open source command line tools on ubuntu/debian). I have several hundred images that look at bit rubbish and I want to try putting them through this sort of filter.
Alternatively, what would be the name of this sort of effect?
What you are looking for is something to help you correct the white-balance of photos.
If you search for imagemagick auto white balance on any popular search engine you will get quite a feew results that are relevant. Sadly, http://www.imagemagick.org seems down at the moment.
I myself found a shell script called autowhite, and used it
me#sophie:[...]$ ./autowhite.sh 5498758807_59a80b3c50_m.jpg corrected.jpg
and the result is perfectly acceptable:
Original:
Corrected:
There are some options to the script, so if you're not really satisfied with the result you'll able to tweak it a tad.
I'm trying to output RTF (Rich Text Format) from a Ruby program - and I'd prefer to just emit RTF directly without using the RTF gem as I'm doing pretty simple stuff.
I would like to highlight specific characters in a DNA sequence alignment and from the docs it seems that I can either use \highlightN ... \highlight0 or \cbN ... \cb1
The problem is that I cannot get \cb to work in either Word:Mac 2008 or Mac TextEdit (\cf works fine so I know it's not a color table issue)
\highlight does work but seemingly only with two of the possible colors (black and red) and \highlight does not use the custom color table.
By creating simple docs in Word with character shading and saving as RTF I can see blocks of ridiculously verbose RTF code that presumably does what I want, but it is so impenetrable that I'm not seeing the wood for the trees.
Part of the problem may well be that Mac Word is just not implementing RTF properly. I don't have a Windows version of Word handy.
Anyone know the right way to shade blocks of text?
Thanks
--Rob
There is a note in the RTF Pocket Guide that says MS Word does not implement the \cb command. It says MS Word uses \chshdng0\chcbpatN (where "N" is the color number that you would use with \cb). The book recommends using something like the following for compatibility with programs that implement \cbN and/or \chshdng0\chcbpatN: {\chshdng0\chcbpat5\cb5 text}.
Note: The copy of the book I have was published in 2003, so it might be a bit out-of-date.
The sequence of RTF commands that seems to be most universally supported by RTF-capable applications is:
\chshdng10000\chcbpatN\chcfpatN\cbN
These commands:
set the shading to 100 percent
set the pattern foreground and background colors to the color from the color table (we're not actually specifying a shading pattern)
set the character background to the color from the color table
Word was the most difficult application to properly render background colors in:
Despite what the latest (1.9.1) RTF spec says, Word 2013 does not resolve \highlightN colors from the \colortbl. Instead, \highlightN maps to a predefined list of colors. It looks like those colors come from the 1.5 version of the RTF spec.
Regarding \cb, the 1.9.1 spec contains this helpful pointer at the end of the section on Color Table:
Note: Windows versions of Word have never supported \cbN, but it can be emulated by the control word sequence \chshdng0\chcbpatN.
This is almost a useful suggestion, except that if you read the documentation for \chshdngN:
Character shading. The N argument is a value representing the shading of the text in hundredths of a percent.
So, 0 turns out to not be a very useful value; 100 / 0.01 gives us the 10000 we used in the sequence above.
Use WordPad to create RTF documents, not Word. WordPad creates much simpler documents, i.e. approaching human-readable.
I use WordPad every time I need to display formatted text in a WinForms application, and need something that the RichTextBox control can handle being assigned to its Rtf parameter.