So I've done my research, and it seems that in order to print documents from Visual Studio using VB, it's a very long and lengthy process of manually drawing every line, rectangle and String on the piece of paper.
Thing is, I sometimes need to print up to 20 pages at once, and there are several functions that require this. After spending a week on creating one such document manually, I've decided to ask two questions:
1) Is it possible to print from a HTML template instead, i.e. inputting a HTML String?
2) Barring that, is it possible to use VB to print from a document that's already existing? This way, I can look into the possibility of generating a document with a different language (hopefully HTML) and print that instead.
EDIT:
I am attempting to do this because the current printing capabilities of Visual Basic is too tedious (boxes and lines have to be drawn at specific x/y coordinates). I would like to speed up this process and hopefully use HTML with CSS styles to print. Is this in any way possible?
I'm trying to use Excel to create AutoCAD drawings. I have a list of product numbers and I'd like to use VBA so that upon hitting a button it will find a block or a drawing file of every product on the list and paste them into an AutoCAD drawing (to a specific point would be a bonus).
So far I've found code that will read from two columns in Excel and will plot a polyline in ACAD using those columns as coordinates. It's very simple but not exactly what I want. Does anyone have suggestions or example code that does something similar? I've found some online using the "ThisDrawing." object but Excel isn't recognizing that so I've reached a stand still. I have all day tomorrow to work on it, so I'll be doing a lot more searching, but any help is definitely appreciated. Thank you
Autodesk provide free downloads on their website so that you can add the VBA IDE into AutoCAD.
Then, inside the AutoCAD IDE you start a new VBA project.
Add a reference to your Excel library so that you can read the Excel spreadsheet.
You need to look up on:
ThisDrawing.ModelSpace.InsertBlock
In the AutoCAD VBA manual. It tells you what various parameters. But they are straightforward - origin, scale, rotation, path to block.
When you call the InsertBlock routine it will create a AcadBlockReference object. You can do any further customization on that object.
this time I'm fighting against a .txt file which doesn't want to be (programmatically) set to be printed in Portrait-mode instead of Landscape-mode (which is the default apparently).
Thing is I know how to do that with application like Word or Excel, but sadly enough I'm working on a device that has no Office at all.
I'm not providing any code at all since my problem is pretty straightforward, and I think I need a simple command in order to solve it. What I basically (programmatically) do in my subroutine is:
Open the file as #1 (I know this appears so '80, but I don't want to modify an up-and-running system, potentially having errors show up)
Write text to the file
Close #1
Save the file
Call text editor shell to show the file to the user
How can I then automatically set the print format to Portrait?
P.s.= I do not have the possibility to insert a userform or an object to print the txt file in "special ways", the user has to print the file from txt editor itself (wordpad just in case)
First to state the obvious: there are no print settings stored in text files (or indeed anything else except for the text). Print settings would be controlled within whatever you are using to print - in this case Notepad or Wordpad.
There are only very limited command line switches for Notepad and Wordpad, which unfortunately don't include page setup. In theory you may be able to automate setting portrait using SendKeys (see here and here) but if it is possible at all it's likely to be difficult and unreliable (focus and timing are two issues).
I can't see a good way round this within the parameters of your question. Adding an object within your application would probably have been the best solution. You might try looking for an alternative text editor you could install that is easier to automate. The only other alternative might be to set defaults within the printer drivers and hope that those stick when the user opens Notepad.
I somewhat inherited a form application that I'm tweaking.. Long story short I merely want a read only view of a word document. I don't want the overhead of launching Word so I thought maybe just a print style preview. I somewhat need to stay away from 3rd party apps so I'm limited. Anyways.. I'm trying to handle pdf's, txt's, image files and word docs. The problem is that I can't seem to load the print preview. I can print it.. but no see it in the PrintPreviewController that I added. Anyone have an example? I'm trying to be careful w/ overhead because I'm already running 5+ stored procs to retrieve info for this prototype.
Anyone? My examples are nasty.. but if you want to see I'd be glad to supply..\
Now I gave a shot to using a Webview and it launches rather in the MS Word application itself.. I see documents on registry tweaks needed.. ugh..
I think you may as well use Word. Check your Task Manager Process list - printing the word document will start up an invisible instance of Word anyway.
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 :)