I have a list of strings (e.g. "A3.11.2.3", "A3.2.1" and "A12.1.3(b)") and need to find a streamlined way to extract the page number(s) on which each sting appears from PDF and Word files.
The list of strings is fixed/can be hardcoded though it would be better if they were read from a particular excel file. The Flow I am trying to create is:
When a file is created;
Search file for list of strings and return all page numbers on which
strings appear with each page number separated by a comma;
Populate a Microsft Word template with each string's page numbers
(i.e. a template table will be created with one string on each
row and in the column beside the page numbers will be populated).
Items 1 and 3 are easy, item 2 has been destroying my brain for how to implement.
The files to be searched are most often PDFs (always file created/no need to add OCR) but occasionally include word documents.
All ideas welcome!
Related
I am looking to merge two documents, however it is not your typical merge.
My first document is a mailmerge, creating a cover letter, basically each page has a name and address
My next document is a static document that cannot be changed.
I need to insert the static document into my first merged document, but after every page, therefore, for every one page a document is inserted.
I have tried the insert document in both word 2010 and pdf using adobe acrobat, and as you have thought it only inserted one document after the first page.
I'm looking at VBA, but I have never utilized VBA and word before
Any pointers would be appreciated.
Many thanks
I should have spent more time on this.
The original template contains fields to merge.
On the static document that I mention, click insert tab, Text Section, select Object - Text From File
Select the cover letter / template that contains the fields to merge. This will insert the template followed by the static document that cannot be changed
Note I have spotted some formatting changes on the template following merge - further work required
From this point start your mail merge, and complete merge to Adobe or word.
This creates a mail merged document containing the cover letter with name and address fields followed by the static document.
Extremely simple. I always over complicate things!
I'll work on the changed formatting, but other then that this works
I am trying to code a program which reads a file, which will contain many words (one word per line), then selects a random line (word) from the file, so I am able to store it in a variable for me to use later on.
I don't really know where to start as I am not very experienced. Any help would be appreciated.
Well first you will need to open the file
file = open('filename.txt', 'w')
Then you need to read the file you can read each line into a list by doing words = file.readlines (this can also be done with a loop or in a number of other ways)
Then you can use the random module to generate a random number and get the word from that index in the words list. Then just store that word to a variable.
There are other ways of doing this but this is one of the easiest.
Is there a way to put invisible markers or id's in a document such that I can
get quick access to a fragment (paragrahp, table), in a way similar to the DIV/id combination used in HTML documents?
Yes, I can use bookmarks to point to a specific location in the document, but they do not the include the fragment itself, I'd be using two bookmarks, one to mark the start and the other for the end. Essentially what I'm looking for is a Word equivalent for named ranges as they are defined in Excel.
Any ideas?
I have a scenario and would like to see if anyone has any suggestions on how I should tackle it. Basically I have a directory full of files, document names consist of [Code]-[number]-[text]
CODE - A generic 3 letter code.
NUMBER - a number generally 4 - 5 digits in size.
TEXT - original document name (Before it was dumped).
CODE, NUMBER and TEXT are separated by a colon (-). Number always starts at the 5 character.
I would like to somehow scan that directory and extract the number from the filename, I would then like to compare that number to a field in a database (SQL query fairly straight forward, could also extract as raw text) If the number matches the number in the database I would like to separate those files.
If I need to clarify anything please ask. I wasn't sure if this site is appropriate for my query.
Open the root folder, click in the file explorer path (in open space off to the side so the whole path gets highlighted), type cmd and hit enter to open a command prompt from that folder location.
Type: dir /b /s > filelist.txt to get a list of all file names. You can exclude /s if you don't need/want to dig down into subfolders.
I'd paste that into excel, if you have 2013 you can just start typing the part you want to extract, after you type the full first line when you start typing the next line it will recognize the pattern and you can just hit enter to fill down.
Otherwise, use Data > Text to Columns and specify - as a delimiter.
Likewise you could just import the filelist, separate them in SQL using SUBSTRING() or similar. When you have your matching filenames you can just use some concatenation to build a COPY or MOVE .bat file, pretty easy in SQL or Excel.
I have a large book written in Microsoft Word and want to create a macro that will find all text using a predefined style and convert that text to an inline image. This text will be in Arabic and generally no longer than 4-5 lines. Is this possible?
UPDATE: Here's an example to show what I'm referring to:
I want to replace that entire line in Arabic with an image (as if I cropped this attached image to only include the Arabic and then replaced the line in Arabic with the image).
The reason I want a macro or script to do this is because there are hundreds of such lines and updating them one by one is cumbersome plus that will make modifications difficult later on.
UPDATE2: I found an interesting option here: http://windowssecrets.com/forums/showthread.php/31344-Convert-Text-to-an-Image-of-Text-in-VBA-(Office-2000-Sr1a)
It looks like you can cut a piece of text and then "Paste Special" as an image. So if there's a way to automate that that might work.
This is not an answer although I hope it will grow into a community answer. At the moment it is an exploration of what is required to solve the problem.
I know from the discussion when this question was posted on Super User that Abdullah wishes to publish his book on Kindle. So the question is really about how to get a document in English and Arabic ready for publication as an e-Book.
The Kindle does not support Arabic. The number of languages it does support is slowly increasing but there is no evidence I can find that Amazon has plans to add Arabic in the foreseeable future.
The format behind an Amazon e-Book is a cut down version of HTML. If a Word document containing Arabic letters is exported to HTML, the Arabic letters are included as character entities; for example: “ﭐ &#amp;64337; ﭒ ﭓ”. Importing the original Word or the HTML version to Kindle, results in the leading bits being discarded so these characters are displayed as P, Q, R and S instead of “ﭐ ﭑ ﭒ ﭓ (Alef Wasla isolated form, Alef Wasla final form, Beeh Wasla isolated form and Beeh Wasla final form).
I have tried Abdullah’s idea of saving some Arabic letters in a PNG file and creating an HTML file containing <p> … </p> <img src= “Arabic.png” > <p> … </p>. The appearance of this file on my Kindle 2 is perfectly acceptable so this has the potential to be a solution. The question is: how can the necessary conversions be performed?
We need to extract each Arabic string from either the Word document or its HTML equivalent and import it into a program that can convert them to PNG files.
The only way that I know of automating this would be to copy each string to a slide within PowerPoint. With PowerPoint’s SaveAs option it is possible to save each slide as a separate PNG file. The slides are named: SLIDE1.PNG, SLIDE2.PNG, SLIDE3.PNG and so on in sequence which would allow a macro to relate the results to the original strings. It would then be possible to replace the Arabic strings in the HTML file with the image elements. None of this would be too difficult to automate but there is a problem with the slides all being the size of the PowerPoint page. The page could be made smallish but what we need is for each slide to be cropped to just bigger than that slide’s text. I cannot think of any way of automating this cropping.
Does anyone have a better approach than converting each Arabic phrase to a PNG file?
I have been looking for PNG editors with some sort of command line interface but can find nothing that would be easier than using PowerPoint. Does anyone know of an alternative to PowerPoint?
Does anyone have any suggestions for automating the cropping of each image? When a string is placed in a PowerPoint slide it is possible to set its width to, say, 6.5cm (which looks good on my Kindle) and get the height determined by PowerPoint. This could be saved for later use if anyone knows how to use it.
Implementing solution
Pending any suggestions for improving the approach described above, the following outlines how I would implement it.
I would not attempt to process the Word document. I would save it as a Web Page, Filtered HTML file, which is a required step on the way to creating a Kindle eBook, and process that.
Within the HTML file created from my test document, the Arabic phrase comes out as:
<p class="MsoNormal"></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><span dir="RTL"
style="font-size:24.0pt;font-family:Arial">
ﭐﭑﭒﭓﭔﭕ
ﭖﭗﺁﺂﻼﻻ
ﻺﻹﻞﻊﻋﻌ
</span><span style="font-size:24.0pt"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p>
I assume Abdullah's document will result in something similar. Note 1: the above is a random collection of Arabic letters. Note 2: they are held left-to-right in reading sequence even though, when displayed or printed, they are read right-to-left.
The whole of this block will have to be replaced with something like:
<br><imc src="xxxx.png"><br>
where the file xxxx.png holds an image of the Arabic text.
The file names, such as xxxx.png, could be systematic (A001.png, A002.png, ...) but I would have thought that transliterating the first ten or twenty characters of the phrase from the Arabic to English alphabets and using the result, with a numeric suffix, as the file name would be more convenient.
I would hold the records necessary to manage the process in an Excel worksheet. I would place the VBA code in the same workbook.
The steps in the conversion process that I envisage are:
VBA macro to extract Arabic strings from latest HTML file and add new strings to the Excel worksheet. (More about the Excel worksheet later.)
VBA macro to create PowerPoint file, with one slide per new string, and use SaveAs in PNG format to create one PNG file per slide before discarding the PowerPoint file.
Human to crop each PNG file. (There appears to be no way of automating the cropping so this task will be minimised by use of data in the Excel worksheet.)
VBA macro to rename each slide from SLIDEnnn.PNG to its permanent name and to record the permanent name in the Excel worksheet.
VBA macro to update the latest HTML file by replacing the block containing the Arabic phrase with the appropriate HTML IMG element.
The Excel worksheet needs two columns: Arabic phrase and PNG file name. If there is any risk of the worksheet being sorted between steps 2 and 4, we may need a sequence number as well.
Macro 1 will extract an Arabic phrase from the HTML file, look down the list in the worksheet for this phrase and add the phrase at the bottom if it is not already present.
Macro 2 will look for phrases in the worksheet that do not have a PNG file name. These new phrases are the ones to be written to the PowerPoint presentation. That is, a phrase only goes into this process once.
Task 3, cropping each PNG file, will be a pain. All I can say is that it will only be once per phrase.
Macro 4 will assume that the SLIDE001.PNG, SLIDE002.PNG, … are in the sequence of phrases without PNG files in the worksheet. If this might not be true (because the worksheet has been sorted) we will either need a sequence number or to retain the PowerPoint file. The macro will assign a unique name to each new phrase, record this name in the worksheet and rename the PNG file.
Macro 5 creates a new copy of the latest HTML file using the contents of the worksheet to determine which phrase to replace with which PNG file.
This process is not ideal but it will achieve the desired result and has no obvious complications. Any suggestions for improving it?
Before you begin these instructions, press record in the Microsoft Word macro editor, so you can see what the VBA code is.
I'm wondering if this will be easier if you convert the docx file to .rtf (rich text format) and replace that line with an image? Go to File > Save As.. > name it "old.rtf", then replace the line with an image and Save As.. again and name it "new.rtf" and then download Beyond Compare or your favorite diff program to see what happened. It should be easy to do this pro-grammatically if you choose to. I think working in text would be easier than Microsoft's binary format unless you can find a good library to modify their doc or docx formats.
Sub CopySelPasteAsPicture()
' Take a picture of a selection and paste it at the
' document end
With Selection
.CopyAsPicture
End With
ActiveDocument.Content.Select
With Selection
.Collapse Direction:=wdCollapseEnd
.TypeParagraph
.TypeParagraph
.PasteSpecial DataType:=wdPasteMetafilePicture
End With
End Sub