How do I convert a pdf to an image? - converters

How do I convert a pdf to an image (say a .png or .tiff file)?
Is there a way to do this without purchasing a third-party component?

Take a look at Imagemagic you can call these programs from roughly any programing language. And it is available on Unix, Windows, Mac, ...

I assume that you want to manually convert a PDF. Yo have two ways of doing it:
Online:
PRO: very very easy.
CONTRA: if your document is somewhat private your are giving it away.
I used last week Neevia and worked perfectly: http://convert.neevia.com/pdfconvert/
In your machine
PRO: More Secure.
CONTRA: You need to download a program and have it setup.
Here you can find 3 ways of converting it online and another three from your pc.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/6-ways-to-convert-a-pdf-file-to-a-jpg-image/

You can use any softwares available in market to convert a pdf to an image, like adobe, ClassicPDF or may be nitro. There are trials available you can download any one of them easily.
For example, try the trial of ClassicPDF and convert your file in seconds, as you asked, its a free one and it does not require purchasing any software, its completely free:
http://www.classicpdf.com/
EDIT: Removed direct download to .exe file and made link to main website. This is a serious no no and should be the users choice to download a file.

Related

How to detect location/place type from the image?

I have a web application where user uploads the images of their locations. I want to write a program to detect the type of location and list of objects from the image. I write a program in C# using alturos YOLO to detect objects in the image. The result is fine for me but the problem is i want to detect the place type from the image. Like, if you upload some image that has snow then it should detect the "Snow" keyword. If you upload the "Lake" image then it should show keywords like "Lake, water, river etc". I am a web developer and never done any Machine Learning or image processing thing. But i am keen to learn this. Is there any way to do this or anyone can tell me the right path to do this.
I found this "https://www.clarifai.com/" but i want to write my own code because i have large number of images.
All in all, I'm pretty sure that there's no single correct answer to this. You could implement image recognition in a hundred different equally correct ways using different tools. So here's my opinionated perspective. Anyone and everyone is free to agree/disagree with what I'm saying.
I've worked a bit with Open CV (Python) in the past. There are a great number of libraries available based on it, so you can probably find a working base to build off of. I think that it should be capable of doing the task you specify, although I'm not quite sure how it would be done.
The other framework for machine learning and object recognition that I have seen is Apple's Create ML/ Core ML system (Swift or Objective-C). My experience with that one is as limited as cloning a git repo and poking around inside, but it looks pretty powerful.

How to search text in multiple Powerpoint and PDF files together on windows?

I have several ppt and pdf files with similar contents and I want to search them together. Is there any application or simple technique available for that? Thanks a lot.
Windows Search might work but learning to use it effectively is a job in itself.
Try Agent Ransack, assuming a Windows computer. It's free and far easier to use than Win search. And is available for pretty much any version of Windows.
Use Windows Search and make sure you have the PDF IFilter installed.
Try Agent Ransack, assuming a Windows computer. It's free and far
easier to use than Win search. And is available for pretty much any
version of Windows.
Agent Ransack works really well for finding .ppt contents. I've used it to find which of several hundred .ppt files in a folder had comments (search for commenter's handle (usually their initials) + á, as in ABCá
Sample search box
Thanks to Steve Rindsberg for pointing me to this useful software. I'd tried Windows search and a couple of PowerPoint freeware programs, but Agent Ransack did the job and saved me manually searching multiple .ppt files.
FileLocater is free to use for personal use. You can search in ppt, pdf, zip files.

Pretty print code to PDF

I'm searching for a tool that will take a source directory and produce a single PDF containing the source code, preferably with syntax highlighting.
I would like to read the PDF on my phone, in order to get familiar with a code-base, or just to see what I can learn by reading a lot of code. I will most often be reading Ruby.
I would prefer if the tool ran on Linux. I don't mind paying for a tool if it is particularly good.
Any suggestions?
You could wipe something up yourself with Prawn and Ultraviolet.
PDF is no good for reflowing. You might like a html based solution better.
And in reading existing code, a lineair model is no good. You need to jump from one file to the other. A hypertext model with history would probably work best on the limited screen estate of a phone. It should borrow some features of the smalltalk IDEs (jump to senders, implementors).
For the UI, take a look at clamato
GNU source-highlight supports many languages and can output LaTeX in particular that can be converted to pdf.
The SciTE editor can export the currently edited file (with syntax highlighting) to PDF (and HTML, RTF, LaTeX and XML).
Alas, it doesn't have batch conversion capability, but IIRC somebody made a batch tool out of this code base.
I realize this is very late, but I wanted to do the same thing, except I wanted it for my tablet, which is a Galaxy Note 10.1 with a Wacom digitizer that I can use to annotate code. I found that one good solution is to use Doxygen to generate a PDF which will have hyperlinks and everything you would want in a PDF. For my use case, I would pair it with EzPDF on Android to annotate the code. This was also for the purpose of learning a new codebase. In the end I ended up not using the generated PDF but it was pretty usable.

Is there a tool that can convert common image formats (.bmp, jpg,..) to .emf files?

I'm using the GoDiagrams suite which seems to recommend .emf files for node images since they scale better on resizing. Bitmaps get all blurry.
Google doesn't show up any good tools that seem to do this... So to reiterate I'm looking for a image converter (preferably free) that converts an image (in one of the common formats like Bitmaps or JPEGs or GIFs) to an .EMF File.
Update: I dont need to do it via code. Simple batch-conversion of images will do.
Inkscape works well, it was recommended to me here.
Irfanview (http://www.irfanview.com) supports many image formats (including .emf). It's also small, fast, and very full-featured. It is free for non-commercial and educational use. I use it for all my image-conversion needs as it will work on batches of files and can rename them as it saves.
Image Magick contains a tool called convert, that will convert from just about anything to EMF files. You can either use this as a separate application, or interface to it using an API that is available in several different languages.
XnView (http://www.xnview.com). Very good viewer and converter.
Try ImageConverter Plus
Try http://autotrace.sourceforge.net/. It is opensource and it has good results. Download from here: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=11789
Really funny one Microsoft. Now this might seem outlandish but it works... (I have Visio2007). Just found this out from a colleague
You can drop a JPEG into Microsoft Visio (no less), Do a 'Save As' to .emf and voila! nice quality of a picture too.

Windows Help files - what are the options?

Back in the old days, Help was not trivial but possible: generate some funky .rtf file with special tags, run it through a compiler, and you got a WinHelp file (.hlp) that actually works really well.
Then, Microsoft decided that WinHelp was not hip and cool anymore and switched to CHM, up to the point they actually axed WinHelp from Vista.
Now, CHM maybe nice, but everyone that tried to open a .chm file on the Network will know the nice "Navigation to the webpage was canceled" screen that is caused by security restrictions.
While there are ways to make CHM work off the network, this is hardly a good choice, because when a user presses the Help Button he wants help and not have to make some funky settings.
Bottom Line: I find CHM absolutely unusable. But with WinHelp not being an option anymore either, I wonder what the alternatives are, especially when it comes to integrate with my Application (i.e. for WinHelp and CHM there are functions that allow you to directly jump to a topic)?
PDF has the disadvantage of requiring the Adobe Reader (or one of the more lightweight ones that not many people use). I could live with that seeing as this is kind of standard nowadays, but can you tell it reliably to jump to a given page/anchor?
HTML files seem to be the best choice, you then just have to deal with different browsers (CSS and stuff).
Edit: I am looking to create my own Help Files. As I am a fan of the "No Setup, Just Extract and Run" Philosophy, i had that problem many times in the past because many of my users will run it off the network, which causes exactly this problem.
So i am looking for a more robust and future-proof way to provide help to my users without having to code a different help system for each application i make.
CHM is a really nice format, but that Security Stuff makes it unusable, as a Help system is supposed to provide help to the user, not to generate even more problems.
HTML would be the next best choice, ONLY IF you would serve them from a public web server. If you tried to bundle it with your app, all the files (and images (and stylesheets (and ...) ) ) would make CHM look like a gift from gods.
That said, when actually bundled in the installation package, (instead of being served over the network), I found the CHM files to work nicely.
OTOH, another pitfall about CHM files: Even if you try to open a CHM file on a local disk, you may bump into the security block if you initially downloaded it from somewhere, because the file could be marked as "came from external source" when it was obtained.
I don't like the html option, and actually moved from plain HTML to CHM by compressing and indexing them. Even use them on a handful of non-Windows customers even.
It simply solved the constant little breakage of people putting it on the network (nesting depth limited, strange locking effects), antivirus that died in directories with 30000 html files, and 20 minutes decompression time while installing on an older system, browser safety zones and features, miscalculations of needed space in the installer etc.
And then I don't even include the people that start "correcting" them, 3rd party product with faulty "integration" attempts etc, complaints about slowliness (browser start-up)
We all had waited years for the problems to go away as OSes and hardware improved, but the problems kept recurring in a bedazzling number of varieties and enough was enough. We found chmlib, and decided we could forever use something based on this as escape with a simple external reader, if the OS provided ones stopped working and switched.
Meanwhile we also have an own compiler, so we are MS free future-proof. That doesn't mean we never will change (solutions with local web-servers seem favourite nowadays), but at least we have a choice.
Our software is both distributed locally to the clients and served from a network share. We opted for generating both a CHM file and a set of HTML files for serving from the network. Users starting the program locally use the CHM file, and users getting their program served from a network share has to use the HTML files.
We use Help and Manual and can thus easily produce both types of output from the same source project. The HTML files also contain searching capabilities and doesn't require a web server, so though it isn't an optimal solution, works fine.
So far all the single-file types for Windows seems broken in one way or another:
WinHelp - obsoleted
HtmlHelp (CHM) - obsoleted on Vista, doesn't work from network share, other than that works really nice
Microsoft Help 2 (HXS) - this seems to work right up until the point when it doesn't, corrupted indexes or similar, this is used by Visual Studio 2005 and above, as an example
If you don't want to use an installer and you don't want the user to perform any extra steps to allow CHM files over the network, why not fall back to WinHelp? Vista does not include WinHlp32.exe out of the box, but it is freely available as a download for both Vista and Server 2008.
It depends on how import the online documentation is to your product, a good documentation infrastructure can be complex to establish but once done it pays off. Here is how we do it -
Help source DITA compilant XML, stored in SCC (ClearCase).
Help editing XMetal
Help compilation, customized Open DITA Toolkit, with custom Perl/Java preprocessing
Help source cross references applications resources at compile time, .RC files etc
Help deliverables from single source, PDF, CHM, Eclipse Help, HTML.
Single source repository produces help for multiple products 10+ with thousands of shared topics.
From what you describe I would look at Eclipse Help, its not simple to integrate into .NET or MFC applications, you basically have to do the help mapping to resolve the request to a URL then fire the URL to Eclipse Help wrapper or a browser.
Is the question how to generate your own help files, or what is the best help file format?
Personally, I find CHM to be excellent. One of the first things I do when setting up a machine is to download the PHP Manual in CHM format (http://www.php.net/download-docs.php) and add a hotkey to it in Crimson Editor. So when I press F1 it loads the CHM and performs a search for the word my cursor is on (great for quick function reference).
If you are doing "just extract and run", you are going to run in security issues. This is especially true if you are users are running Vista (or later). is there a reason why you wanted to avoid packaging your applications inside an installer? Using an installer would alleviate the "external source" problem. You would be able to use .chm files without any problems.
We use InstallAware to create our install packages. It's not cheap, but is very good. If cost is your concern, WIX is open source and pretty robust. WIX does have a learning curve, but it's easy to work with.
PDF has the disadvantage of requiring the Adobe Reader
I use Foxit Reader on Windows at home and at work. A lot smaller and very quick to open. Very handy when you are wondering what exactly a80000326.pdf is and why it is clogging up your documents folder.
I think the solution we're going to end up going with for our application is hosting the help files ourselves. This gives us immediate access to the files and the ability to keep them up to date.
What I plan is to have the content loaded into a huge series of XML files, each one containing help for a specific item. This XML would contain links to other XML files. We would use XSLT to display the contents as necessary.
Depending on the licensing, we may build a client-specific XSLT file in order to tailor the look and feel to what they need. We may need to be able to only show help for particular versions of our product as well and that can be done by filtering out stuff in the XSLT.
I use a commercial package called AuthorIT that can generate a number of different formats, such as chm, html, pdf, word, windows help, xml, xhtml, and some others I have never heard of (does dita ring a bell?).
It is a content management system oriented towards the needs of technical documentation writers.
The advantage is that you can use and re-use the same content to build a set of guides, and then generate them in different formats.
So the bottom line relative to the question of choosing chm or html or whatever is that if you are using this you are not locked into a given format, but you can provide several among which the user can choose, and you can even add more formats as you go along, at no extra cost.
If you just have one guide to create it won't be worth your while, but if you have a documentation set to manage then it is the best to my knowledge. Their support is very helpful also.

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