I would like to create pdfs with ruby. One special need is embedding a picture into text (or a textblock), which means I need to be able to let the text flow around the image. E.g. the image should be in the rigth upper corner and the text should start left of the image and continue after the image by using the whole width of the page. How can I do this in ruby? Thank you for any suggestions!
In the past to get print quality PDFs in Ruby, I used rtex.
It's fast too, which is a real bonus.
Prawn to the rescue?
I like the html -> pdf approach. Although it is probably not the best option (prawn is) it makes it easy to design the pdf. See this website. You could also go for the approach documented at jimneath.org.
Good luck
iText is the heavyweight that will allow you to do anything you want with PDFs you can bridge to it with jRuby.
Another option I used was driving open office (it has a ui less option which you can automate from Ruby)
How about having Ruby generate some LaTeX code, then use pdflatex to produce the PDF?
Although I haven't done it myself I've seen people use a headless Open Office. You can control it from Ruby and use it to generate PDF files. You can even use an Open Office template and just fill in some elements into it.
Related
i am not shure, if there are many Processing-people inside Stackoverflow, anyway:
What is the fastest way to generate an animated .gif-file out of Processing 2?
Thanks in advance!
You've got a couple of options:
Use the gifAnimation library
Save an image sequence from Processing, then encode a gif with an external tool (like ImageMagick,GIMP, Photoshop, etc.)
Also check out this answer for more details
George's answer is correct if you want to do this programatically, and it's what you should do if you care about gif quality.
Another quick and dirty alternative is to capture your screen directly.
I use a tool called ScreenToGif. You can record your sketch directly, without any exporting or encoding on your end.
Here is another question with a bunch of similar tools.
I need to maintain some slides in both latex beamer and in powerpoint. (This is to make slides available for instructors elsewhere, too, 90% of which do not know how to use latex and are unwilling to learn it. and I am a latex guy on linux.)
I have tried the route via Libreoffice (and opendocument), but this did not come out well. right now, the best method that I have found is to author pdf in beamer, then run it through a nuance OCR program to get MS Word...and not even go all the way to Powerpoint (which is where I really need to be).
If I only had a markup language that produced nice Powerpoint, I could probably code a perl translator from markdown to this intermediate markup language. (going from markdown to latex beamer is relatively easy.)
I don't think this exists, but hope springs eternal. after all, it is almost 2014 now. does anyone know of a solution?
One solution is to use odpdown: It converts markdown to the OpenOffice Presenter format, which can be imported into PowerPoint.
It is not yet complete, i.e. table support is missing and possibly not running on certain Windows setups, but nevertheless it could be a start. Possibly, you have Linux running, where it seems to work.
Steve Rindsberg's answer in the comments works on PP 2007 works! Let me repeat it here:
I suspect that PowerPoint is the likeliest solution. ;-) But what sort
of slides are you creating? If they're simple heading and bullet point
slides, all you need to produce is a simple text file. Any text that
starts in the left column will be the heading of a new slide. Indent
one tab and it becomes a first-level bullet point under the current
heading; indent two tabs, it becomes a second level bullet point and
so on. Simply use File | Open on the text file to pull it into PPT.
Steve: Is this all that PP converts? Or is there a reference of other "sneaky" markup that PP knows about?
(pandoc: unfortunately, the conversion from libreoffice to powerpoint is pretty poor when I tried it last. I also tried to save and understand the powerpoint xml format, but that was REAL bad.)
The easiest way to handle this is to work with:
RStudio (and R if not already installed)
RMarkdown
Pandoc 2.0.5 (minimum)
Install those 3 (or 4) items, then read: https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown/powerpoint-presentation.html
The installation time is worth the time saved copy-pasting everything from scratch.
I also am a Linux guy and I also use LateX engines to create nice documents. Based on my experience, here's what you should do :
Stop writing directly in LaTeX and start using org-mode to write documents instead (I spent years writing in LaTeX and now it's over (except when I use modernv package))
Org supports latex math formulas and .org files are easily exported in .tex files
Org can also be easily exported in markdown
Once you have your markdown, there are several tools that will allow you to create a PowerPoint. Two of them are pandoc and md2pptx
-Hello Sandeep here. I am an apprentice to the Jedi Master Yoda. My master believes the force is strong in the Ruby community and has chosen me for a simple task to complete using the Ruby langauge:
I need to use the Prawn PDF gem to accomplish the task. I have an existing pdf document called Dooku.pdf - it contains sensitive information on the Evil Count Dooku's activities. In Dooku.pdf there is text called {galaxy}. {galaxy} is always in the same location on every page of the pdf document.
I need to open Dooku.pdf, replace each instance of {galaxy} with {planet} and then save/close Dooku.pdf. How do I accomplish this task using the Prawn PDF gem?
-May the force be with you.
You can't. Prawn is for writing PDFs, not reading them.
1) I'm a star wars fan and all, but damn.
2) Your "simple task" is not even remotely simple. It's not that hard to COVER the existing text... but REPLACING IT is another mater entirely. And forget reflowing existing text. All-but-impossible.
If covering it will suffice, then you need only draw a rectangle filled with the background color over your first string, then draw your second string on top of it. I'm not familiar with Prawn PDF, so I'll leave the implementation details as an Exercise For the Reader.
Late and around, but in Ruby you can call Applidok PDF merge, which allow to write user data (e.g. from a Web form) on any existing PDF. See Ruby doc: http://doc.applidok.com/merge-ruby.html .
I don't know anything about either library but I have to choose one of them.
Which one whould you recommend?
I'm using Perl. I need to generate images for weather site. The image is generated for a location and should contain temperature and a weather condition image inside. I guess this is a piece of cake for both libs. But I want to know which one is more powerful. I've read that libGD is not able to rotate text. Maybe there are some other drawbacks? Which one generates images faster? Whose API is easier to use?
according to this source, you should use GD:
GD and other modules built on top of that (like GD::Graph) are more aimed at producing "new" images like charts.
And you can read "Develop your own weather maps and alerts with Perl and GD", which is what you're looking for.
If you some some time. try them both, play a little, and decide.
I find both to be straightforward to use ImageMagick gives you a lot more power than gd. Here are two Magick examples from my posts:
How can I use IO::Scalar with Image::Magick::Read()
How can I resize an image to fit area with Image::Magick?
to give you examples of the API.
I have used GD to create a visualization.
See Script : giss-timeline-graphs.pl on that page.
imagemagick is more robust, however libGD should be able to cover most of the image generation tasks as well. you should see perl API/functions to both of these libraries to see what is more convenient for you.
I've been admiring StackOverflow's default quilt-like profile pictures (which I notice are also on the Fail Blog) and am curious what program both are using to generate them.
But what I really want to know is: If you were to design the system to create default profile pictures, how would you do it?
I'm looking for ideas on what algorithm you'd use, as well as things like how you would related the image to the user, be it related to their username, or some portrayal of their progress (ie the image gets more complex, or larger, as they gain reputation).
FWIW, the default pictures are generated by gravatar, which is why you'll see them on more than this site.
It's called an Identicon. On Stackoverflow it Gravatar uses your IP address to generate the image.
This is an editorial, not necessarily an answer.
Those auto-generated avatars on this site come from a service (Gravatar) that focuses exclusively on providing avatars and is therefore the core of their business. For apps that aren't specifically intended to generate and display avatars, I would just go with an empty placeholder (like Facebook). It's a neat feature, but is it worth your development time when a simple placeholder would be just as effective?
A very good source of images would be flame fractals. They are rather computationally expensive, so simply sourcing them from a project like electric sheep or having them be rendered by the user's computer should be considered to offload the work.
Who wouldn't want default profile pictures like these?
alt text http://sheepserver.net/v2d6/gen/202/124809/icon.jpg alt text http://sheepserver.net/v2d6/gen/202/124805/icon.jpg alt text http://sheepserver.net/v2d6/gen/202/125373/i77.jpg alt text http://sheepserver.net/v2d6/gen/202/125431/i116.jpg
Use a Julia set or something like that and set the initial conditions to a hash of the user's email address.
I'd use a jpeg server tool (aspjpg or similar) to manipulate the image on load so it displays their badges within their profile pic.
In fact, using any tool to dynamically generate images is pretty cool. Applying some sort of 3d or flash technology to dynamically create images using random variables for eye spacing or facial structure would be pretty wicked as well.
But ya this is a weird question. hah!
I did something similar years back, I used POV-Ray to generate little 3D scenes with torusses (torii ?) and spheres. There were lots of parameters to tweak such as the position, size and colour of each object.
POV-Ray is a scriptable 3D render engine, you can find it here.
Unfortunately my images all looked too similar to each other. I love Gravatar's identicons as uses on this site. I think the symmetry helps and the shapes are unique enough that you can identify users fairly clearly.
In ruby there have a library http://github.com/swdyh/quilt to generate it!