For pushing small changes to an existing wim image, you can significantly reduce network traffic by using the previous wim file as a base wim and a file that contains only the "changes" as the main wim.
wimlib is an open source library for playing with wim files, and it has an awesome feature to make doing creating these "changes-only" wim files. You just do:
.\wimlib-imagex.exe capture <folder_to_capture> <output.wim> --delta-from=<base.wim>
The result is a tiny output.wim that has only metadata and the files that differ from base.wim. You can then apply the image, even with Microsoft's tools, as so:
Expand-WindowsImage -ImagePath <output.wim> -Index 1 -ApplyPath `
<output_folder> -SplitImageFilePattern <base.wim>
Two questions:
Do Microsoft's first-party imagex/dism tools offer any way to get
the same functionality (just so I can avoid adding another
dependency if possible)? They offer splitting an existing wim into pieces, but I don't see anything to help create a "delta" type wim from a folder/wim and a base wim.
If not, are there any issues I should be aware with when using
wimlib? My use case is capturing and applying images via Microsoft's
Deployment Toolkit. I see wimlib does not support NTFS extended
attributes yet, but MDT does not capture those as far as I can tell.
Related
We are in the 21st century and still there is no good way to tag photos and videos? There is always a dependency on some tool... Is there no way to make the file autonomous with respect to its tags?
Video files, for example, are not friendly to tags. some video formats do not allow tagging at all. Some tools keep the meta data in their own external representation and when you copy the original file to some new destination, the meta data of the file in the destination is lost. Also this metadata may only be seen by this proprietary tool and is not seen by other tools (e.g. tagging by Adobe products are not visible/searchable in Windows Explorer)
Is there a universal way to tag any file including video files so that
searching for files having a certain tag is possible in any tool
when a file is copied, the tags are transferred with it
when the file is edited in any tool and re-saved, the tags are not lost...?
There are no universal ways at this point, if there ever will be one.
Probaby the closest we got is file tagging provided by popular OSes based on a certain file systems' feature called 'forking'. By this means Windows and Mac provide an ability to easily add meta data (including keywords) to any file on the file system, without changing the file's content. One serious drawback of this feature is that it does not cross file-system's boundary, i.e. if you simply upload a file to the web, or copy it to a different type filesystem - the metadata will be lost. There are ways to copy such metadata but that requires consideration and use of appropriate tools.
I am using Evolution (flatpak package) as a Personal Information Manager. However, when I try to print an E-Mail as .pdf, I have not full access to my filesystem. I can only save the .pdf in some restricted file tree.
I have used the trick to print the .pdf in the ~/.gnupg folder, and then using the ordinary file manager copy-paste into any folder—But that is no long-term solution.
How could I make the pdf-printer in Evolution have access to the whole filesystem?
Apparently, there is some kind of bug in Evolution concerning this issue (see forum), whereas in other applications such as Inkscape (flatpak) everything runs smooth.
The quickest fix is to add the option --filesystem=home to the running command of Evolution (see forum), namely,
flatpak run --filesystem=home org.gnome.Evolution
Maybe you have to edit your desktop entry of Evolution (See desktop editor)
I am writing a documentation for a project that involves multiple developers. We use Subversion (SVN) to work on our code base.
I wrote the first draft of the documentation document using HelpNDoc, which I like for the nice tree-view and easy of use; the problem is that there is a single file, so I don't know how to use SVN to allow other developers to contribute to the documentation and update it.
Do you know if it's possible? If not, can you advice a nice software, easy to use, with a tree-view of the documentation that can be used with SVN or makes it possible for multiple users to update it? We use Windows.
HelpNDoc projects are binary files based on the SQLite open source database engine. The advantage is that the whole documentation stored in a single file so it can easily be copied, moved, shared, backed-up...
However one drawback is that it has to be checked-in as binary content in any version control system including Subversion: diff and merge are not possible on those files.
One possible solution would be to use external documents in HelpNDoc's library: each user works on her own document (which can be a Word document, and HTML web-page...) and a master HelpNDoc project is created to include those documents at generation time. See "Include a file at generation time" in the following step by step guide: How to add an item to the library
Amount of files doesn't matter, real format (text/* or binary) - does. If SVN|any VCS can merge two HelpNDoc files with diverged history (just try it by hand), you'll be happy
I once used Helpinator for software documentation, it's pretty close to HelpnDoc but it's storage format is more suitable for version control.
We've got a system that takes in a large variety of PDFs from unknown sources, and then uses them as templates for new PDFs generated by Prawn.
Occasionally some PDFs don't work as templates for Prawn- they either trigger a generic Prawn error ("Prawn::Errors::TemplateError => Error reading template file. If you are sure it's a valid PDF, it may be a bug.") or the resulting PDF comes out malformed.
(It's a known issue that some PDFs don't work as templates in Prawn, so I'm not trying to address that here:
[1]
[2])
If I take any of the problematic PDFs, and manually re-save them on my Mac using Preview > Save As [new PDF], I can then always use them as Prawn templates without any problem.
My question is, is there some (open source) server-side utility I can use that might be able to do the same thing- i.e. process problematic PDFs into something Prawn can use?
Yarin, it at least partially depends on why the PDFs don't work in the first place. If you can use them after re-saving with Apple's (quite bad) preview PDF code, you should be able to get the same result using a number of different tactics:
-) Use an actual PDF library to open and save the PDF files (libraries from Adobe and Global Graphics come to mind). These are typically commercial products but (I know the Adobe library the best) they do allow you to open a file and save it, performing a number of optimisations in the process. The Adobe libraries are currently licensed through a company called DataLogics (http://www.datalogics.com)
-) Use a commercial product that embeds these libraries. callas pdfToolbox comes to mind (warning, I'm affiliated with this product). This basically gives you the same possibilities as the previous point, but in a somewhat easier to use package (command-line use for example).
-) Use an open source product. I'm not very well positioned to provide useful links for that.
There is another approach that may work depending on your workflow and files. In graphic arts bad files are sometimes "made better" by a process called re-distilling; you basically convert the PDF file to PostScript and re-distill the postscript into PDF again. Because this rewrites the whole file structure, it often fixes fundamental problems. However, it also comes with risks as you're going through a different file format. Libraries such as GhostScript (watch the licensing conditions) may allow you to do this.
Given that your files seem to be fixed simply by using preview, I would think a redistilling approach would be overly dangerous and overkill. I would look into finding a good PDF library that can automatically open and save your files.
I need to split PowerPoint presentation file (pptx and, if possible, ppt) into a set of original format files (pptx or ppt) – each containing one slide from the original. I need to do this programmatically on Linux Ubuntu server using free tools or external free API. When a file gets uploaded to a directory program will be called from my main program (written in PHP) and do the split.
I am looking for suggestions about language or set of tools to use. I looked at several options listed below. It will take some time to try all of them but if anyone could exclude or add to the list and/or provide code examples it would help.
Thanks!
(1) Apache POI project (POI-XSLF)
(2) OpenOffice unoconv command line utility
(3) C# (with compiler Mono for Linux). This may include indirect option of deleting slides with powerPoint.Slides(x).Delete
(4) JODConverter (Java OpenDocument Converter)
(5) PyODConverter (Python OpenDocument Converter)
(6) Google Documents API
(7) Aspose.Slides for .NET is out because of cost
When I had the same needs I ended up shelling and using "UNOCONV" to convert the files to PDF. And then used "PDFTK" to split the file by pages. Once that is done you should be able to take the extra step and convert the new split PDF files back to PPTX using one more UNOCONV.
While it seems rather complicated, PPTX seems to be "that one ooxml file no one wants to touch". Libraries seem to be few and incomplete mostly.