I have developed a simple but effective tool to automate counting the instances of a specific statement in "sticky note" comment boxes. I'm using this fir marking student exam scripts. Users are using Ctrl+C,Ctrl+C to copy preexisting comments. However in some instances the comments paste directly on top of a preexisting comment. The script counts all but the user has not intended there to be a duplicate.
I'm looking to find a way to access the coordinates of the comment boxes on the PDF so I can check for coordinate duplicates.
Thanks in advance.
coordinates of the comment boxes
All comments are Annotations, and Annotations are required to have a "Rect" entry that defines the coordinates/location of the annotation.
Rect is an array of 4 numbers, defining two opposite corners of the axis aligned bounding box (AABB). The canonical form is to define the bottom left first, and the top right second, but you should just assume it is two opposite corners.
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I am using the rigid body physics option in blender to drop balls (meshes) into a box. Some of the balls miss the box entirely and fall past the box. I want to be able to select just the balls which fall into the box an export them individually to an .stl file, with their global position (after settling in the box).
I think I know how to export the files, but am having trouble on how to select the mesh objects based on their position at a given frame. I am planning to use this for multiple instances, and hence I need help with a way of doing this via scripting using python.
Note: The balls are dropped from a random height and when I select the object, the z position it shows still looks like its initial starting position.
Im new to blender, so any help is greatly appreciated
I did find this elsewhere, you need to use .matrix_world.translation rather than .location to select objects via their locations at a given frame
I'm placing hundreds and hundreds of boxes in dozens of carts with an optimization algorithm.
Problem:
How the boxes fit in the carts should be presented to the Access user visually and in print, and it should support moving individual boxes to other cart, by supplying a box ID and target cart ID and redraw. More ideally, via drag-and-drop.
What have I tried:
Rectangle objects on a Form. Hits the object limit after a few hundred boxes.
DuckDuckGone. Looked at Canvas and CanvasShapes. They seem to not be canvases proper?
Looked at external tools to say, compose a PDF. It wouldn't be interactive, though, and data would have to be passed as XML or similar.
Question:
Is there a way to draw say, 1000 rectangles in any type of window (Form, Report, etc.) in Access 2013 using VBA?
The rectangles are coordinate-based, so that it can't be presented as a table; you wouldn't see the physical dimensions of the carts and how the boxes fit in them.
In reports, you can, with the Report.Line Method.
But it will work (AFAIK) only in Print Preview and Print, not in Report view. So no interactivity whatsoever will be possible.
But I'm pretty sure it's your best option in Access.
Sorry I can't embed images, I have the links instead (... I can only post two links. I have removed the http:// substring from some of the links).
I am looking to take an .csv file (really, any file, as I am generating this myself), and create a Visio (2010) diagram out of it. I have successfully imported the excel sheet to Visio, and can create some rough diagrams, but they are not enough. This is what I'm trying to create. Here are the following tactics I have tried, I prefer the VB method, but whatever works works:
Data Graphics: This is the closest I've gotten to a solution. Basically you create shapes and you can put data in it. Problem is, the style of display available are limited, as we can see here (imgur.com/clTLcxk). After importing the excel sheet, all I had to do was drag and drop to create these shapes. The closest I have gotten is here. However, I really need the outside box (or container, for aesthetic reasons). (Some information here [support.office.com/en-us/article/Enhance-your-data-with-data-graphics-45af64a4-1dcb-4463-9a7e-67709786181c])
VB: I have been using this (msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff959245%28v=office.14%29.aspx). I have ran some of the example code, but I am really lost. I have run some of the example code but the only one I have really gotten to work are useless to me. Also, I don't see any API methods that actually add data to these diagrams!
So how is this done?
I would approach this problem by first defining or finding Visio masters that would the data I'm drawing to the page. In your case it looks like you'd want a master for your Foo items, and one for your Bar items.
So then you'd step through your Bars, then within each Bar you'd have one or more Foos. For each Foo, you would drop that master out, and set the text of the shape to what you want in the blue Foo section (maybe a grouped sub-shape for the Foo master), and then text in the white body.
When stepping through all the Bars, you'd obviously have to drop out a Bar shape and position/size it to contain all the Foos.
What I am ultimately trying to do is to create a grid of images for print that are minor variations of the same thing (different text is all). Looking through online resources I was able to create a script that changes the text and exports all of the images necessary (several hundred). What I am trying to do now is to import all of these images into a new photoshop document and lay them all out in a grid and I can't seem to find any examples of this.
Can anyone point me in the right direction to place a file at a specific coordinate (I'm using CS5 and have the design suite so if there is a way in illustrator to do this quickly...)?
Also, I'm open to other ideas on how to do this (even other programs) easily. It's for labels so the positioning on the sheet has to be pretty precise...
The art layer object has a translate() method that takes delta x and y params. You'll need to open each image, copy it to the target document, get its current location (using artLayer.bounds) and do the math to find the deltas to position it where you want it. Your deltas can be in pixels so you'll get plenty of precision.
Check out your 'JavaScript Scripting Reference' pdf in your Adobe install directory for more details.
Ok I'm marking Anna's response as the answer because though I didn't fully test it, it seems like it should work and answers the original question with jsx. However I'm also leaving my final solution in case anyone else runs across this with the same issue and may prefer this method as well.
What I ended up doing instead is using InDesign. I figured out that it has a grid option that lets you import a number of files and place them all in an equal grid in a single command. This is almost exactly what I was looking for, except that it leaves a small border/margin in between the columns and grids and mine were designed to meet exactly.
I couldn't figure out how to make it not have the border (I have very little experience with InDesign, it may be possible). However I was able to select all my images and scale them uniformly to be the correct size, then I just selected each column and dragged it over to snap to the adjacent column and the same with rows...
I'd like to extract all of the information (formatted text, images, etc) from powerpoint slides into a flowing, readable (MS Word-style) format.
I'm not interested in keeping the slide concept at all--think of taking class slides from a college course and batch converting them all into one collective study guide.
I can't find a way to do this within powerpoint (though if you know of one, please share!) and,
I don't have experience scripting Office apps. Is this kind of thing easily done? Does this kind of script already exist somewhere?
Clarification:
In an earlier version of this post, I used the word "flowing" to refer to a slide-free (MS Word-like) format. This does not, however, refer to the actual formatting of slide content. So keeping bullet lists, etc. is fine and even desirable.
I don't see this being a simple task. College professors use a format of either "TITLE: BULLET POINTS OR IMAGE" or "EVERY WORD I'M ABOUT TO SAY" for their slides in my experience, and you're just not going to get flowing, readable text from the former no matter what you do. For the latter, you've already got your text, you just have to copy it to another document.
I think you might as well just open the PowerPoint, select all the text, and copy+paste into Word/Publisher/InDesign/your favorite page layout program. You'll have the same effect and the same amount of editing after the fact except without all the hassle of writing a program to do it for you.
Doing a Print operation to a PDF with the N-up options might be a good solution for handouts if that's all you need. You could expand the idea and condense ALL the slide decks into one, get it printed (with N slides per page and the note space next to it) and bound, and voila, instant study guide. I've seen that, and then you get options for note taking.
More power to you if you're doing this just because you can - don't let me stop you. There is much good learning to be had that way. You might want to look into writing a program using the Microsoft.Office.Interop namespace in .NET (starting at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb772069.aspx ), or perhaps look on CPAN ( http://search.cpan.org/search?mode=all&query=powerpoint ) and do it with Perl! There are lots of ways to do it, but you've got to be up for the challenge.
Text is fairly simple to extract, but what text do you want? The text from the title and body text placeholders only? File, Save As, and choose to save the outline.
The other text on the slide? That can be pulled out to a text file programmatically, but in what order? Suppose you have a complex diagram with text callouts. Extracting the text is going to give you gibberish. There's no obvious/meaningful order to the text other than what the human viewer supplies by noting that "Ah. The arrow next to this bit of text points to the fribulator sub-assembly, so must relate to it in some way." Try doing that in code. ;-)
You could give the author a way to sort the text into reading order so that the code knows what order to extract it in, but that would require a fair amount of work on the part of the author.
If you can be certain that all of the content is in title+bullet form, no worries. Otherwise, you'd have to be able to articulate exactly what you want extracted, in what form and in what order before you could get anywhere with this.
MS Word-style is not only readable, but writeable as well (which was not specified in your requirements). If you want a read-only guide, PDF is your natural choice (either through Acrobat Distiller or LibreOffice). Combine individual Acrobatted presentations with PDFtk, or Acrobat or Foxit and you're good to go without any programming at all.
"Is this kind of thing easily done?" - Yes, your humble servant did a couple of similar scripts ages ago (extracting enhanced metafiles from Powerpoint slides).
"Does this kind of script already exist somewhere?" - Yes. Probably at hundreds of places, but not sure if any of them get posted to the 'Net. All things considered think you'd be better off learning some scripting and macro programming on your own, since a ready-made script may be not quite fit for your needs - and to understand and rewrite it you'd need more time than to code & debug from scratch.
Since you mention that title+bullet form is ok, open the file, choose to save as and pick Outline as the save-as type.
I think you could parse through the PowerPoint file for formatting, text and pictures. There are Visual Studio namespaces available for such a task. You open the file, parse through it and make Word file from these. Complicated work, as you would have to consider type of elements and their position, you would have to use a temporary structure for each slide.
Have a look at this sample code :
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/gg278331.aspx
How to: Get All the Text in All Slides in a Presentation
Basically, using c# and openXML SDK 2.0, it loops through all the slides in the presentation, and then adds each text in every slide into a string builder. You can write out the result into a text file if you like (modification required).
Recommendation: <25 oct 2012>
For your study guide, maybe you could extract all the text in each slide, and dump those text programmatically (by adding that function into the sample code above while it's iterating the slides) into the "Notes" section of each slide. With that, you can print it in Notes Page view. You'll get the entire slide image at the top half of the page, and the actual slide texts at the bottom of it in the Notes Page view. It sure beats trying to copy and paste all the text from the slide into the notes section. You can even print it 2 slides per page, as small text would not be an issue inside the slide's image, and diagrams would still be visible more or less.
Unfortunatly, this method works for simple standard slide format ... meaning, it's OK if your slides just have a title, and a center text box with all the bullet points... any complex slide layout (maybe text boxes scattered everywhere) will come out in non-order and will be confusing. But at least you can still look at the slide image above to make sense of it :)