I'm looking for some advice on how to get started on a project my team is working on internally. The basic situation is this:
We receive PDF's that are 250-500 pages in length. Some of those pages (let's say, 10-15 of them) may have color on them. Of those 10-15 pages, some might need to remain in color. if it is identified that none need to be printed in color, we print in black and white. Otherwise we print color.
Currently we tab through each of those pages to find pages with color. As you can imagine, this is very time consuming. I am looking to build a solution that perhaps will output page numbers (as an example) of pages with color so the end user can simply jump to the page being referenced and make a determination. I am not sure where to start on this and i'm looking for some advice.
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I often spend hours bringing pictures into PowerPoint templates one by one and trying to customize the way a presentation whose behavior is very different.
If there were a way to randomly select an image from all of the images on a different slide or excel file or folder and have them appear based on the probable weight assigned to them, it would be a huge time saver.
I've seen various methods of having a random object appear, and some of them don't even require a macro, but importing the images is always very time consuming. If anyone knows of a better/faster way to link a folder with a group of images or something along these lines to an object that is randomized, please help.
Importantly, showing a random image from a batch group without customizing the way each image is brought in is the hard part. Adding weight helps, but it could be done by duplicating important images repeatedly.
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'm writing some logic to build a large single PDF file that our users can print at their convenience. I'm using Java's iText library (through Clojure's clj-pdf).
I'm trying to have the PDF show the same exact template form on every single page, however I can't seem to find any documentation or indication that one can have PDF content "fit to a page".
The text in these forms varies a little bit, so there's a chance it might require more of fewer text lines per page. This means that the content has a chance of spilling over to the next page, or being too short, making the next page creep up into the previous one, breaking the requirement of "one form per page" for the rest of the document.
I'm trying to figure out if my option is pretty much only to manually check the length of the text on each page and potentially crop it by hand if I goes over n lines, or if the PDF format somehow supports a smart way of having paragraphs+tables+headings all fit in one page. Some UI systems allow you to control how spill-over is handled, anywhere from cropping to resizing the font, so I'm curious if PDF supports anything of that sort.
Edit: ended up going with pagebreaks for simplicity, wasn't aware of that option when I wrote this question.
If you want to take control over the space taken by text, for instance to fit it on a single page, the way to go would be to create a ColumnText object and to add the content in simulation mode. If the text fits the page, add it for real. If it doesn't, use a smaller font size. This is demonstrated in the MovieAds example where snippets of text are fitted into AcroForm fields.
I am working on a project, SIGGRAPH Image Wall.
My first challenge is to figure out how to extract titles of each page in a PDF, SIGGRAPH 2013 Technical Papers First Pages (44 MB PDF).
This PDF is a compilation of the first page of each papers.
Therefore, there is a paper title for each page, a little different from
the traditional scholar paper.
Does anyone have any idea for this?
I think you can accomplish this using any of a number of text extraction approaches, though I will caution that getting to 100% accuracy will be tricky...
Some possible tools to use:
pdftotext or pdf2txt - Simple and easy cross-platform extraction utilities.
PDFNet - Robust SDK for digging into PDFs and pulling out exactly the data you want.
Perl modules: PDF::API2, CAM::PDF - I'm a Perl guy so I'd go this route, but I'm sure similar libraries exist in Python, Ruby, etc.
Your source pages look reasonably consistent - I feel like you'll be able to make some smart guesses about where on the page your content will be and what it'll look like. I'd try this out:
Inspect the PDF manually to figure out the title font name and size.
Extract text information for the top portion of the page (something like the top 150 pixels). Make sure to extract font info.
This should get all of your title text and maybe some author names. Parse this data (either within the script you write, or in the XML output files from pdftotext, etc.), keeping only the words that match your title font info.
If the title font varies, you'll need to guess what the title font is for each page and differentiate it from author names (the only other content you should get from the top of the page) which you can probably do simply by comparing font sizes.
I have a user sign off report where it shows a users rights/access to the system which all fits nicely onto one page when I hit preview. However when I then go to print layout it shows me two pages with the second page only containg the footer.
Any ideas please?
Are you sure the page size matches the paper size?
If so, have you tried setting the page footer's PrintOnLastPage property to false? Then again, if you really need that footer to be there (seeing that there's only one page), you might have to try fiddling with the margins to get it to fit within the first page.
The report size at design time, plus the margins must be less than the paper size. Sometimes you can have a report that is too wide that is essentially generating a blank page "to the right" rather than underneath the first page.
Yes I have scrunched it all up so that it is WELL within the page size and I have tried all combinations of Footers (and headers).
It is a slightly wierd report in that it has fields that need to grow to show all the information and a small table too, but even at full growth the data looks like it fits on one page (in preview in Visual Studio) but as soon as it goes to print preview and printing it reverts to two pages.
Make sure you do not have extra area to the right of the last field of the report.
Are you sure you've adjusted the report's display size in the property sheet, too?
Hope this helps,
Bill