I'm making a poster (sort of) and would like to do these things, but I'm not sure if AsciiDoc or AsciiDoctor can do them, and if so, how:
Background image that can be stretched to the poster's dimensions
A rectangle with some transparency and a border, basically a bright frame, with text in it.
An image with text in it.
Text inside an image inside a rectangle.
(Bonus question: Is it possible to free-form specify where something goes, e.g. x=80%, y = 20% for something in the top right corner?)
I'm not sure that it makes sense to use AsciiDoc to source poster output, as opposed to a desktop publishing tool or a graphics program.
But if you are converting to HTML, you should be able to accomplish most of this with clever sourcing and some CSS/JavaScript on the front end. That is, you can source some of the metadata you want to impose on the final image, then have front-end code do the manipulation and imposition. For instance, you can provide a caption, classes, a title, and other info in the source, but AsciiDoc is intentionally agnostic about how that stuff is handled in output.
However, unless you need to create these things as part of technical documents, especially ones getting built/generated recuringly with automation, you're likely better off with a specialized tool.
Related
I want to make a steganographic image using some very simple software. I want to demonstrate the principle by opening up a bitmap image file in an editor that will let me see the binary that encodes the colours of individual pixels. I want to change the last couple of bits for some pixels to hide my secret binary message, then re-save the image. I have seen that there are a few applications available that can create steganographic images, some of which are free, but they seem to hide what is really going on. I want to see and edit the 'raw' binary for myself. I hoped something like Notepad++ or Cyberchef would let me do this, but apparently not. Can you suggest something I can use please?
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.
Say I have a range – something like a 400x400 rectangle at 60, 60 – which is dynamically generated by a separate program. I'm wondering how it's possible to crop my document to that range in the command line?
Everything I've read has suggested I'd need to add a rectangle to the document, resize the document to that rectangle (resize to selection), and then remove the rectangle.
But I'm having trouble with adding and removing that rectangle. I found the ToolRect verb, but I can't seem to find anything related to actually drawing that rectangle (or removing it).
So, am I doing this wrong or is there just no way to add (and select) the rectangle using only the command line? Using another program is also fine, but I haven't had much luck with that (I couldn't get the python modules installed for the only possibly helpful thing I found..).
In this email discussion from 2012, someone said:
There is no way to pass parameters to verbs (with the current
implementation, they don't take parameters by design).
In case they add this capability later, the required verbs to crop the page would be:
EditSelectAll
SelectionGroup
ToolRect (requires parameters, i.e. where to crop)
EditSelectAll
ObjectSetClipPath
FitCanvasToDrawing
FileVacuum
FileSaveAs (requires a parameter, so that we don't have to overwrite the original)
Since Inkscape can edit any valid SVG, I'd rather look into other available SVG libraries, like this one for Python.
If you are OK with rasterising your image, take a look at this question. Inkscape unfortunately ignores the --export-area option when exporting to svg or pdf.
My – admittedly, unsatisfying – solution was to create a separate program to add a viewbox to the SVG text.
The program I made was implemented into a separate part of my project, so I don't have a good command line version, but if you plan on making one yourself, whatever XML editing library you have for your language of choice should be all you need. I used xmldom for Node.js with relative ease.
What language or technology would I need to be able to create documents online? I want to be able to add text and images and move them into position, resize etc, similar to this.
And then when complete, create a PDF from them.
Sorry if this is a bit vague, I just need to know where to start researching.
You need to decide on your basic technology: Flash, Silverlight, Canvas, client-side SVG, server-side SVG or server-side bitmap. There are also commercial solutions that work with Adobe InDesign documents (and probably a host of other proprietary formats) but I'd expect those not to be cheap.
Flash/Silverlight require plugins, and are considered by some to be a dying technology - though I am sure that is disputed. Canvas is 'very HTML5' and is essentially a bitmap built/rendered on the client, but if you are ultimated rendering to PDF it may not provide the resolution you need. The same limitation affects building an image server-side too - you should probably be dealing with vector elements plus bitmaps, rather than rendering everything to pixels as you go.
That leaves SVG in my list, either on the client (see RaphaelJS) or on the server (see Inkscape). I'm doing some work with server-side SVG rendering at the moment, and it is promising; although subject to more scalability issues than client-side, it doesn't suffer from browser-compatibility issues or the limitations of browser rendering.
The biggest issue in browser SVG rendering is flowed paragraph text and text in/on a path - I am not sure how well these are implemented in modern browsers, or how much agreement there is between them. This is especially the case given that some of these require SVG1.2, and browsers (afaik) are only just settling on SVG1.1, after many years. But, if you just want to do standard blocks of text, bitmaps and vector elements, browser-based SVG should suit you fine.
The example you've given uses a server-side technology (SVG, or perhaps a commercial format) and renders to low-res PNG on the client.
In your case, once you've considered how to 'do the editing', you'll need to consider how to render to PDF, which will be done on the server. You could go low-level and use something like FPDF, use a report renderer like Jasper, or use a graphics system like GhostScript, Inkscape, Scribus, ps2pdf, svg2pdf etc.
Aside: I normally don't answer questions without obvious prior research. But, since you've indicated that you will indeed undertake this, I'm happy to help get you started.
I want to create something like a leaflet/magazine using Latex. Is it possible to place text on top of an image and style the text freely?
Any links to examples of something like this?
I usually do something like
\usepackage{tikz}
...
\begin{tikzpicture}
\draw (0, 0) node[inner sep=0] {\includegraphics[width=4cm]{imagefile.png}};
\draw (1, 1) node {Hello world};
\end{tikzpicture}
A very good toolset for manipulating images is pgf/TikZ pdf doc.
See \pgfimage for examples. It allows to mix text and image freely. There are many ways to do it. One of them is to use layers (p. 220 of pgfmanual). The pgf manual contains many simple examples, and is very precise.
Another solution is to use the lpic package: the homepage contains some examples.
You can find other examples for pfg and TikZ here and here for many impressive examples.
You can also define the text after the image and then offset it using negative vertical space. Because it follows after the image in the LaTeX source, it will be drawn on top of the image instead of underneath it.
\includegraphics[...]{...}
\vspace*{-20ex} % Tune this to the image height.
\begin{center}
Text
\end{center}
\vspace*{20ex} % The spacing above but without the minus.
Another solution is the textpos package which allows you to specify boxes at absolute positions on the page. The boxes can overlap, so you can put the figure in one box, and text in another box on top of it.
I realise that the question is old and answer is accepted, but for completeness would like to propose an alternative approach for making leaflets in LaTeX.
Specifically, the leaflet document style served me really well for this purpose.
A good blog post wrt background image can be found here. There are a couple of packages that are required to use in order to make the proposed approach work, but were not mentioned in the blog post:
\usepackage[usenames,dvipsnames]{xcolor}
\usepackage{transparent}
As already suggested, you can annotate the different parts of the figure using TikZ. However, sometimes it might even better to use numbers to reference the different parts and explain them in the figure caption.
To easily get the precise relative positions (which is often tedious) and to generate LaTeX code automatically, you could use the new web-based LaTeX Overlay Generator, which I built for such cases. This is just a small interactive tool, which helps you to find the right locations.
Another way to do this, admittedly not using LaTeX, would simply be to edit the image with photoshop or gimp or something like that. I guess your option in terms of typesetting mathematics might be fairly limited doing it this way.
Otherwise I'd endorse using tikz.
Are you sure you want to do it in LaTeX? Desktop publishing software might be more suited to your needs... Something like scribus might be easier than tikz in terms of learning curve, depending on what you want to do.
I'd like to add on to #midtiby's answer...
You can also specify the text position using a relative position, like so:
\usepackage{tikz}
...
\begin{tikzpicture}
\node[inner sep=0] (image) at (0,0) {\includegraphics[width=4cm]{imagefile.png}};
\node[above=0 of image] {Hello world};
\end{tikzpicture}