I wrote a script which tests several rasterization programs, by using the official W3C SVG test suite and comparing the rasterized png with the expected pngs pixel by pixel.
The problem is, with v. 1.1 first edition (2011) and v. tiny 1.2 (2008) test suites, in a lot of images the vectors doesn't match with the expected png, because the revision number is not the same, making a lot of false-positives (more than 90%), like this one.
However it's ok with the v. 1.1 first edition test suite.
I could trunk the png to remove the area with the revision number, but it's a really derpy solution.
So by which png should I compare the rasterized vectors ?
Thanks.
There is no non-derpy solution to this problem, for a few reasons. The test images from this time were never meant to be ref-tests (that is, they are not pixel-by-pixel matches). Also, some of the tests that appear in the later test suites were not accepted as legitimate tests, so the revision numbers were not updated.
The later SVG 1.1 2nd edition test suite should be considered canonical, but even that contains some revision-mark errors, like coords-trans-06-t.
This is actually an issue for the SVG WG to resolve, and I'll raise it with them. The revision numbers in all approved tests should match the PNG references, and we can revise the tests so that the revision numbers match.
In the future we'll be converting these tests (and writing new ones) for SVG 2 as reftests and scripted tests in the web-platform-tests project. The SVG 1.1 tests are at this point unmaintained.
If you really need up-to-date PNG reference images, you could regenerate them. They are generated using Batik's command line SVG to PNG conversion tool. In the SVG Working Group's old CVS repository, there is script (script/generate_reference_images.pl) to do the conversions and a set of SVG files to use (imagePatches/) to convert for tests that we knew Batik didn't get right with the original markup.
I've zipped up SVG 1.1 Second Edition test suite sources and put them here in case you want to try re-generating the images.
Related
I've already used ghostscript to check PDF files and now i need to identify a pdf with more than 1000 nodes. Is it possible to use ghostscript to count the number of nodes a PDF have?
My knowledge with ghostscript is basic and I have difficulty finding a solution in ruby (PDF reader 1.3) or using tools like imageMagick.
Edit:
I can not explain in a more technical way what kind of node I'm looking for. These nodes are equivalent to those found in the corel draw. Initially I thought it would not have equivalent in pdf however the pitstop plugin has the functionality to indentify nodes.
Example of identified nodes by PitStop Pro
Those aren't 'nodes', they are the start and end points of path segments. Ghostscript doesn't have a device to extract paths. It could do so easily enough (and recover the curve control points which don't appear to be displayed in your PitStop screen grab).
However, Ghostscript isn't an editing tool, so its not at all clear what you would intend to do with the information.
If you want this, then you are going to have to either parse the PDF yourself, or write a Ghostscript device to retrieve the information, or write a program for some other tool (eg MuPDF) to extract path information.
In order to test the results of most of my business requirements I need to find out if a PDF is rendered correctly.
A typical test involves a few UI interactions with an Web application and the download of the resulting PDF.
Then the results should be compared to their expectations.
Is there a testing framework capable of examining a PDF?
There are already lots and lots answers on StackOverflow dealing with similar questions.
Look at this list:

How to unit test a Python function that draws PDF graphics? (StackOverflow)
Visual diff PDF files in order to determine pixel perfectness (StackOverflow)
How to compare two PDF files through command line (StackOverflow)
Comparison of two PDF files (StackOverflow)
PDF compare on Linux command line (StackOverflow)
I have to extract text from invoices and bills pdf files
The files layouts can get complex, though its mostly filled with tables.
I've read a few dozens articles already about the pdf format, how easy it is for our brain to grasp it and how hard it is for a machine to understand its structure.
Also downloaded a few tools like the python's pdfminer and some java tools, some even have rule based layout extraction, like LA-PDBtext these are all great libraries, leaving you the final step.
Adobe also has an online service called exportPdf but it can't be customized
Bottom line, I understand that in order to extract text from structured pdf files and convert it to XML for example, there should be some level of manual work.
I also found From Data Extractor, a non free tool with the ability to set extraction rules that claims to do the job, though its hard to find a proper manual and it runs only on windows.
I thought I may even try a to convert those files to images and try tesseract-ocr but decided to ask for advice here before I spend more time on it.
I'll be very grateful if someone with such experience give me a hint.
I've done a lot of PDF extraction and I can confirm as you've already discovered that it can be a painful process to start. One of the important things to understand is that there is no concept of "tables" within a PDF, just text that happens to have lines around it. Also, there's no guarantee that the linear order of text within the PDF code actually matches the visual order when printed. In other words, there's no guarantee that "hello world" is written in that order, it could be draw 'word' at coord 20 then draw 'hello' at coord 10. Most PDF creators don't do this but still there's no guarantee. The more creative a PDF creator is (InDesign, Illustrator, etc) the more likely the text is going to be harder to get out. And actually, once a designer starts messing with fonts too much some programs will sometimes actually output words one character at a time, changing the font just slightly each time.
That said, I'd recommend the first one that you looked at, LA-PDFText. You can run it in discovery mode (blockify) from which you can create rules. I don't have Java installed anymore so I can't test it but it seems very promising.
Your second one, A-PDF Form Data Extractor, only really works with actual PDF forms. If this is your case I'd recommend just using an open source solution like iText/iTextSharp.
The last OCR one makes me cringe. I just can't imagine going through those hoops would get you better text representation than parsing the PDF. But then again, PDF is a visual format so maybe it would.
Personally I use iText/iTextSharp for this kind of thing but I also like to do things the hard way.
It is not clear if you are looking for the development tool to automate the data extraction from bills and invoices or just for the one time tool (utility) that can be used by the non-developer?
Anyway here are some specialized tools including engines they use:
Tabula (open-source, especially designed to extract data from tables in PDF. Can export shell scripts for batch processing, runs as the localhost web service, powered by JRuby Tabula engine)
Viet OCR (open-source .NET desktop utility for text extraction from PDF and images, based on tesseract oct engine)
Bytescout PDF Viewer (freeware closed source .NET utility, detects and extracts tables, including scanned invoices, powered by PDF Extractor SDK)
DISCLAIMER: I work for ByteScout.
I have several A4 PDF documents which I would like (two into one) "glue" together into A3 format PDF document. So I will get from 2PDFs A4 a single one sided PDF A3.
I have found the excellent utility PDFToolkit and some others but none of them can be used to "glue" side by side two documents.
I just came across a nice tool on superuser.com called PDFjam that can do all of the above in a single command:
pdfjam --nup 2x1 file1.pdf file2.pdf --outfile DONESKI.pdf
It has other standard features like page size plus a nice syntax for more sophisticated collations of pages (the tricky page re-ordering necessary for true booklet-style page imposition).
It's built on top of TeX which is, whatever it is. Installing is a breeze on Ubuntu: you can just apt-get install pdfjam. On Mac OS, I recommend getting BasicTeX (google "mactex basictex"; SO thinks I'm a spammer and won't let me post the link).
This is a lot easier and more maintanable than installing both pdftk and Multivalent (on both Mac OS for dev and Ubuntu for deploy), which wasn't going so well for me anyway...!
Found the following (free and open-source) tool for doing Imposition called Impose (thanks danio for the tip). This solved my problem perfectly.
EDIT:
Here is how it's done:
Use PDF Toolkit to joint two PDF files into one (two A4)
pdftk File1.pdf File2.pdf cat output OutputFile.pdf
Create from this a single page (one A3):
java -cp Multivalent.jar tool.pdf.Impose -dim 2x1 -verbose -paper-size "42.2x29.9cm" -layout "1,2" OutputFile.pdf
I would like to advertise my pdftools
It's written in Python so should run on any platform. It's a wrapper to Latex (the pdfpages packages) but can do lot of things with a single command line: merge pdf files, nup them (multiple input pages per output page) and number the pages of the output file (you specify the location and the format of the number)
It still needs some work but I think it's quite stable to be usable right now :)
This puts two landscape letter pages onto a single portrait letter sheet, to be "bound" (i.e., folded) along the top.
pdftops $1 - |
psbook |
pstops -w11in -h8.5in '4:1#.65(.5in,0in)+0#.65(.5in,5.5in),2U#.65(8in,5.5in)+3#.65U(8in,11in)' |
ps2pdf - $(basename $1 .pdf).psbook.pdf
By the way, I do this often, so I'll probably submit more "answers" to this question just to keep track of successful pstops pagespecs. Let me know if this is an inappropriate use of SO.
A nice, powerful, open-source imposition tool is included
in the PoDoFo package:
http://podofo.sourceforge.net/
It works for me. Some imposition plans can be found at:
http://www.av8n.com/computer/prepress/
PoDoFo can do lots of other stuff, not just imposition.
Another useful imposition tool is Bookbinder (on the
quantumelephant site). It has a GUI that appeals to non-experts.
It is not as flexible or powerful as PoDoFo, but it can do
imposition.
pdftk is more-or-less essential to have, but it will not
do imposition.
pdfjam is useless to me, because there are a wide range of
valid pdf files that it cannot handle.
I've never been able to get multivalent to work, either.
What you want to do is imposition. There are commercial tools to impose PDFs such as ARTS crackerjack and Quite imposing but they are pretty expensive (US$500), require a copy of acrobat professional and are overkill for imposing 2 A4 pages to an A3 sheet.
On the Postscript side, a tool named pstops is able to rearrange pages of a Postscript file in any way you could imagine. I've not heard of such a tool for PDF. But pdf2ps and ps2pdf exist. So a not-so-ideal solution may be a combination of pdf2ps, pstops and ps2pdf.
I would combine the two A4 pages into one 2-page PDF using pdftk. Then Print to PDF using something like PrimoPDF, and tell it to print to A3 format, two pages per side.
I just tested this printing some slides from PowerPoint. It worked great. I selected A3 as my paper size in PowerPoint, and then chose to print 2 pages per side. Printed to Primo and voila, I have two A4 slides per A3.
You can put multiple input pages on one output page using BookletImposer.
And you can change page orders and combine multiple pdf files using PDF Mod.
With these two tools, you can do almost everything you want with pdf files (except editing their content).
I had a similar problem. I tried Impose but it was giving me an
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: tool/pdf/Impose
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: tool.pdf.Impose
(...)
Could not find the main class: tool.pdf.Impose. Program will exit.
I then tried PDF Snake which isn't free or open source, but has a completely unrestricted 30-day trial version. It worked perfectly, after tweaking the parameters to achieve what I wanted. It's a great tool. I would definitely buy it if it wasn't so expensive! Anyway, I thought I'd leave my 2 cents in case anyone had the same problem I had with Impose.
look at this
http://sourceforge.net/projects/proposition/
It needs laTex to run,
but when it does, works really fine
Regards
Not sure this is a programming question, but we use LaTeX for all our API documentation and user documentation, so I hope it will go through.
Can someone please explain what are the relative merits of using pdflatex as opposed to the "classic" technique of
latex foo
dvips -Ppdf foo
ps2pdf foo.ps
From time to time I run into people who have difficulty because things don't work in pdflatex, and I know that using pdflatex gives up two things I have grown to value:
Can't use the very speedy xdvi viewer
Can't use the PStricks package
I should add that I typically get PDF with hyperlinks by using something on the order of
\usepackage[ps2pdf,colorlinks=true]{hyperref}
so it's not necessary to use pdflatex to get good PDF.
So
What are the advantages of pdflatex that I don't know about?
What are the disadvantages of the old tools that I've overlooked?
My favorite pdflatex feature is the microtype package, which is available only when using pdflatex to go directly to PDF, and really produces stunning results with no effort on my part. Apart from that, the only caveats I run into are image formats:
pdflatex supports PDF, PNG, and JPG images.
the postscript drivers support (at least) EPS.
Also, if you want to install fonts, the procedures are slightly different depending on what fonts that driver supports. (Hint: use XeTeX to instantly enable OpenType fonts.)
As it turns out, I recently read a post that shows the difference directly. Any document that uses tables or narrow columns will be improved automatically. I also find the inter-word spacing to be far more pleasing with pdflatex.
Is xdvi much faster than xpdf? I find the edit, TeX, view cycle to be very quick with pdflatex.
Have you tried MetaPost or MetaFun for graphics? I tend to put graphics creation in the hands of the capable, but MetaFun would likely be the package I'd use. Just reading the manuals is a pleasure.
Also pdftex is the engine under development (towards luatex) and maintenance. I'm not sure the DVI counterparts are as actively maintained.
PStricks is supplanted by Tikz.
I didn't use xdvi in years, so pardon the trollish rhetorical questions: Does xdvi display vector fonts? Does it support synctex (jumping to and from code)? Does it have the confort of use of PDF readers like Skim?
Taco Hoekwater is working on Escrito, a Postscript interpreter written in Lua, which would allow you to use pstricks in Luatex. He has an impressive project completion record: maybe I should have used "will" rather than "would" in the previous sentence.
I used pdflatex to generate the PDF for my ICFP 2009 paper. (I still needed to use standard latex to generate the PostScript file.) I did so for two reasons:
I couldn't seem to get ps2pdf to generate Letter, rather than A4 output, no matter what command line options I used.
For the printers, I needed to produce a version 1.3 PDF file, not 1.4. pdflatex made this easy to do. I set the PDF author and title information while I was at it.
Both of these problems may be fixable in some way, but as a first-time latex user, I didn't find any obvious solutions, nor did more experienced users whom I'd asked.