I am currently dealing with a large .docx file (roughly 400 pages). It is divided up into sections that are very easily digestable by humans and look like this :
Bold text
Written paragraph
This is perfectly humanly readable and great. Unfortunately we have an in-house program in our University that uses the mark-up of .docx files to sort them out/do some processing on them. By this I mean that sectioning a .doc/.docx using only bold markup is not enough, you must use the in-built tools within MS Office to do this (as below) :
So what I need to write is a simple script that will find the text that is bold within a .docx document and convert this text to properly marked up "Heading 1"s, or similar. It doesn't concern me whether or not the .docx file format is maintained or anything like this.
is it possible to do this? What APIs/languages/tools should I start looking into to accomplish this relatively simple task?
Using a short VBA macro you can iterate over all paragraphs and change the style for all paragraphs containing only bold text into a heading style:
Sub FormatBoldAsHeading()
Dim p As Paragraph
For Each p In ActiveDocument.Paragraphs
If p.Range.Font.Bold <> wdUndefined And p.Range.Font.Bold Then
p.Style = WdBuiltinStyle.wdStyleHeading1
End If
Next
End Sub
Related
I am trying to do exactly what is described in the following thread:
AppleScript/Automator: renaming PDF with extracted text content of this PDF
So I am using the Chino22's version and there are two issues with it:
First, instead of the contents of the pdf, theFileContentsText gets some metadata stuff.
Second, althought the script runs to the end, I get the following error for the last step:
error "The variable thisFile is not defined." number -2753 from "thisFile"
So, how do I get the text contents instead, and how do I define thisFile to the current pdf that is being processed in the loop?
Thanks in advance!
I would not expect the linked script to work.
Except for document metadata, extracting text content from PDF is notoriously difficult and unreliable, and not a road you want to go down if you can possibly avoid it. Adobe’s PDF file format is designed for printing, not for data processing. PDF files contain blocks of Postscript-like page drawing instructions, typically compressed, and while it’s possible for PDFs also to include the original plain text for accessibility use, most PDF generators do not do this so the only way to get the original text is by reconstructing it from those low-level drawing instructions—not a trivial job.
AppleScript’s read command only reads that raw file data; it does not parse it into drawing instructions, never mind translating those drawing instructions back into plain text. Change a PDF file’s extension to .txt and open it in a plain text editor, and you’ll see what I mean. Nasty.
If you need to work with the PDF’s original content (text, images, whatever), your best solution is to get those files before they were converted into a PDF.
If you must extract content from a PDF file, use an existing tool that knows how to do it.
For instance, if you’re lucky enough to have PDFs that contain XFDF (XML form) or accessibility data, there are 3rd-party apps and libraries to extract that content in readable form. I can’t think offhand of any that are AppleScriptable (Adobe Acrobat has only minimal AS support) so you’ll probably need to find one you can run from command line (do shell script in AS).
Or, if the PDFs have a consistent visual structure, a 3rd-party library such as Python’s PDFMiner (which I’ve used in the past) can identify blocks of characters by position and convert those back into strings with varying degrees of reliability (it has to convert font glyphs back into Unicode characters, guess at which characters are close enough to constitute a word, and where to insert space and return characters between those words). You’ll have to write some Python code to extract the bits you want, so look for tutorials to get started (or pay someone to write it for you).
But again, if you can possibly avoid having to extract text from PDF, you should. You will save yourself a lot of trouble.
I regularly have to produce word documents that are pretty standard. The content changes regarding certain parameters, but it's always a mix of pre-written stuff. So I decided to write some ruby code to do this more easily and it works pretty well on creating the txt file with the final text I need.
The problem is that I need this text converted to .docx and with specific formatting. So, I'm trying to find a way to indicate in the text file which text should be bold, italic, have different indentation, or be a footnote, to make it easy to interpret (like html does). For example:
<b>this text should be bold</b>
\t indentation works with the tabs
<i>hopefully this could be italic</i>
<f>and I wish this could be a footnote of the previous phrase</f>
However, I haven't been able to do this.
Does anybody know how this can be achieved? I've read about macros and pandoc, but haven't had any luck achieving this. Seems too complicated for macros. Maybe what I'm trying is not the best way. Perhaps with LaTeX or creating html and then converting to word? Can html create footnotes? (that seems to be the most complicated)
I have no idea, I just learned Ruby with a video tutorial, so my knowledge is very limited.
Thanks everybody!
EDIT: Arjun's answer solved almost the whole issue, but the gem he pointed out doesn't include a funcionality for footnotes, which unfortunately constitute a big part of my documents. So if anybody knows a gem that does, would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Ahh Ruby got gems for that ;)
https://github.com/trade-informatics/caracal
This would help you to write docs from Ruby code itself.
From the Readme
docx.p 'this text should be bold' do
style 'custom_style' # sets the paragraph style. generally used at the exclusion of other attributes.
align :left # sets the alignment. accepts :left, :center, :right, and :both.
color '333333' # sets the font color.
size 32 # sets the font size. units in 1/2 points.
bold true # sets whether or not to render the text with a bold weight.
italic false # sets whether or not render the text in italic style.
underline false # sets whether or not to underline the text.
bgcolor 'cccccc' # sets the background color.
vertical_align 'superscript' # sets the vertical alignment.
end
There is also this gem, https://github.com/nickfrandsen/htmltoword, which converts plain html to doc files. I haven't tried it though.
I'm looking for a nice way to generate either a Keynote file from XML or a Powerpoint file that I can then import to Keynote. Basically, I'm looking for a simple human-writable markup format (for easy scripting) that can be exported into slides.
I volunteer with a local nonprofit, where anything remotely technical falls to me. On a fairly regular basis, I'm sent information for events and produce a nice looking printed program in Word, though much of the same material also goes into slides in Keynote. (Keynote is used rather than PowerPoint so that Keynote Remote can be used.)
Anyway, there's a large volume of text I work with that I'm sent via email, and it has to go in both a Keynote presentation and a Word document, and requires all sorts of odd manual formatting to not break pages or slides at odd times, also requiring a good deal of manual restyling, since I'm not going to allow something I do to come out looking like something sloppy from the 1990s.
My hope is to write up a Ruby script that I can feed the source text to, and it'll go do all the processing for me, at least for Powerpoint or Keynote. I've normally had fantastic luck finding a gem for just about any format or service I've wanted to work with, but I haven't found anything that works with Powerpoint or Keynote.
My next thought was to have the Ruby code generate appropriate XML since both Office and I Work allegedly open the Office XML format, but I couldn't find any actual friendly documentation for human-writable XML code.
Is it wishful thinking to want to be able to do something like the following?
<SLIDE FORMAT="Title & Bullets">
<SLIDE_TITLE>
Lorem Ipsum
</SLIDE_TITLE>
<PARAGRAPH>
[etc.]
All I can find as far as converter scripts is all related to charts and tables and such which is of zero use here), usually revolves around opening or converting FROM Powerpoint or Keynote rather than creating, and furthermore generally seems to be for Windows using OLE or VBScript. This needs to run on the Macs they have there, so no Visual Studio stuff, Windows related scripting, etc will work. I don't HAVE to do it in Ruby, but that's what I'd be most comfortable with on the Mac end of things.
So is there documentation out there on a marginally friendly XML format for Powerpoint or Keynote, or even better, a Ruby gem for either?
If all you need to do is title + bullet point slides, you simply need to create an ascii text file. Each line of text will become the title of a new slide. But if the first character in a line of text is a tab, the line will become a first level bullet point on the same slide as the previous title. If two tabs, it indents the text to a second level bullet point and so on.
This becomes the title on slide one
This becomes the title on slide two
<tab>This is a bullet point, first level
<tab><tab>And this is a bullet point, second level
<tab>Back to first level bullet point
And another new slide
Once you have the text file, you can do File Open in PPT and force files of type to all files . and select your .TXT file. Or you can use Insert Slide From File to bring the .TXT file into an existing presentation.
There's a limit to the number of slides you can create at one go like this; 100 perhaps?
Note also that VBA disappeared in Mac Ofice 2008 but is back in Mac Office 2011, so if you can find examples of VB/VBA code that do what you want, you can use them on Mac, so long as it doesn't have to happen in Office 2008.
I need to output text to a .doc file. I am currently just outputting to a file like usual and using a .doc at the end of the file name
File.open('output_file.doc', 'a+') {|x| x.write(str)}
The issue is I want to make some of the text red and bold. How can this be achieved? I am using ruby, but I can easily switch to jruby thanks to the amazingness that is rvm, so if there are java libraries for this, that'd be great as well.
The short answer: use .rtf and then convert to .doc using word or open office. The following .rtf file (writes "normal text red text more normal text." and colors and bolds the red text):
{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf1038\cocoasubrtf350
{\fonttbl\f0\fswiss\fcharset0 Helvetica;}
{\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;\red255\green0\blue0;}
\margl1440\margr1440\vieww13280\viewh10420\viewkind0
\pard\tx720\tx1440\tx2160\tx2880\tx3600\tx4320\tx5040\tx5760\tx6480\tx7200\tx7920\tx8640\ql\qnatural\pardirnatural
\f0\fs24 \cf0 normal text
\b \cf2 red text
\b0 \cf0 more normal text.}
The long answer:
Strings are just plain ascii text, so there is no command that can make them bold. This is a property of all files in general, not just how Ruby works with files.
What text-editors do is use key strings within the file as commands to render the text in a certain way. For example, double asterisk surrounds bold text in the Stack Overflow editor. The file format of a file determines these rules.
.rtf is a basic file format that has the features you want and is easy to convert to .doc using msword or open office. THe advantage to .rtf is that it is human readable. So you can write an rtf file with red text, rename it .txt and open in a text editor and see what "decorations" the red font added. Play around with the parameters
If you are curious, the complete .rtf specifications can be found here:
http://www.biblioscape.com/rtf15_spec.htm
What's all the garbage at the top? That is header stuff. Fortunately you don't need to add more header material to add more text.
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.