I need to make a script for ACIS files manipulation, for example:
I have 1 SAT file exported from a CAD software with a 3D Model, and i want to create a script in some language (php, python, etc.. even .BAT if it works) that opens the SAT file delete all the components inside my 3D model. I just want the outside of the 3D model.
There is some way to do this? becuase i look to the SAT file and it's an ammount of text lines, maybe with a RFC and some tricky tools i can do this..
Any ideia?
Best Regards,
Pedro Vieira
Pedro,
SAT is the proprietary format of the ACIS solid modeling kernel which is provided by Spatial Corp.
It is a commercial 3D geometry modeling toolkit.
I do not believe you'll find a reliable way of doing what you're asking without licensing the toolkit.
Full disclosure- I work for Spatial.
If you can export a STEP file, it is an open format which is documented and quite reliable. Wikipedia has an article on STEP here.
-Brad
If you has an ACIS distribution, it has a tool that allows you processing SAT files with a LISP script. I worked with ACIS several years ago, and I remember I could find SAT file format description (not very detailed) in the net. Probably there are tools that can work with SAT besides ACIS, but they are usually not very powerful. I think ODA Teigha library also can do a trick or another with SAT files, if you get your hands on it. Mastering SAT format processing yourself is probably not a best choice.
Related
I've been tasked to build a program which provides a UI that creates, imports, edits and exports database files and generates PDF (or PDF convertible) reports based on the database information. I want to store and backup database files and folders using Dropbox. Database information will consist of text and images.
My problem is my only programming experience is in firmware design for microcontrollers or similar hardware at which I am proficient. I have minimal experience in software design though I have some basic fundamentals down from my college years. I've spent a lot of time working in C language and I have previous experience using java. I have no experience creating executables or working with database files or producing nice PDF reports from buffered information.
My primary question is where do I begin? What advice would you give on where to start? Is it realistic that someone with my experience could learn how to build this sort of program in a 4-6 month period? What tools would you use? Is there anything particularly difficult about what I'm trying to do? Do you know of any useful tutorials or learning programs that would help me get my foot in the door?
Thank you,
There's a lot of ways to tackle this problem. We all come from different backgrounds and experiences. Here is how I would approach the problem. However, there may be limitations based on your budget and licensing options!
I would utilize QT and its many supplemental libraries as the core framework for the system.
Use QML to create front end
Pass data between front end and controller c++ file. '[Expose c++ to qml]'2
Use QT database API to I/O with whatever you are targetting.
Use QPdf writer to write the PDF file.
For image processing use something like openCV
This solution would utilize mostly c++ and QML to tackle the project.
I am going to start my final project for spring semester at school and looking at feasibility before I put my leg in it. One of my potential projects requires me to make an archiveable document of web sessions. These archives should be searchable (and if possible with pretty design). PDF and Open Document formats are in mind for now. Is there any thing else I can look into besides these ? I want to make sure that I pick the right plan before my school starts so that I can be confident about it. I have to use C#.NET for this.
Any suggestions are welcome.
Regards,
Lalith
If you want to convert logs into PDF, You can use Third Party Libraries. There are plenty of c# .NET VCL are present. Like,
iTextSharp(Not free for Commercial use)
Report.NET(free,No Support)
PdfSharp(free,No Support Yet)
Gnostice PDFOne .NET(Non Free,With full help,support)
But if you want to create PDF using c# yourself, it is a pretty hard work since PDF uses PostScript which may be very new and complex to you. First Study the format you are going to use and make sure you can implement it. I would suggest to stick with PDF since its platform,editor independent.
http://www.gnupdf.org/Category:PDF
What I need is to read pdf, make some transformations (generate TOC bookmarks) and write it back.
I found this http://hackage.haskell.org/package/HPDF , but it only mentions generating pdf, not the parsing (although I could have missed it)
Haskell is chosen purely for (self)educational purposes.
There are a few tools for PDF manipulation, though they seem to bias towards generation, rather than parsing:
http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
Pandoc is a great cross-markup library, but doesn't support PDF parsing (it does support PDF generation from a variety of formats).
There's also:
http://hackage.haskell.org/package/HsHaruPDF
http://hackage.haskell.org/package/pdf2line -- tool for extracting text from pdf
http://hackage.haskell.org/package/HPDF -- another pdf generation library
I'm not sure we have a good parsing tool yet.
Also as a learning exercise, I started a PDF parsing library in Haskell, but it's incomplete and has been languishing a bit from lack of attention. I'd be happy to share it with you, and would love feedback, improvements, etc. It's not currently hosted on hackage, but if you're interested in working with an incomplete implementation, let me know and I'll ask some colleagues for advice on getting it up there.
Here's a haskell binding to parts of xpdf:
http://hackage.haskell.org/package/pdf2line
Checkout pdf-toolbox library. It's support for PDF file generating is low level, but powerful enough for your task.
Here is an example how to change title of an existing PDF file using incremental update feature.
Another package to consider is rakhana which is also on hackage.
Ive been reading about seaside and like the sound of it but i cant see an easy way for handling data files, primarily importing Excel. Of course csv files would be more straight forward, but are there any ways to import the various Excel formats (xls,xlsx) without writing your own file parsing routines?
I've heard that the need to open Excel files would be a good reason to choose a windows based system like .NET, what do you guys think?
There are various Smalltalk implementation that support Seaside and that have an excellent integration into the Windows platform: Dolphin Smalltalk, VA Smalltalk, and Cincom Smalltalk. I assume that it is possible to call Excel with any of these.
There are various command line tools available that you could call to convert an XLS file to something you can easily parse (like CSV).
However, I think the most elegant solution (also from an end-user perspective) is the one of Magic/Replace.
Just an answer on the second part of your question: no that is not a good reason. You definitely do not want to run Office as a server proces (I never tried with OpenOffice, but that should work somewhat better).
It is not stable and there are license issues you have to be aware of.
I've worked on a Seaside app that read and wrote excel sheets on Linux. Here's what I did …
First, I had OpenOffice run in the background and converted all office files to OpenDocument format,
and then I imported that into Squeak using some code by Takashi Yamamiya. A word of warning: by the time when I used it, excel import and export didn't work at all, it took me an afternoon and a bit of hacking to get that running, but then it went fine (Niko, why didn't you push the changes back online? Well, you see … ehh, I forgot. And now they're somewhere well hidden on my disk and I don't feel like searching.)
And that's it. It wasn't even slow, just make sure that OOo is running constantly in the background.
is there an open source solution that displays PDFs for online reading? It has to be searchable much like google books and if possible has the ability to display annotations?
By "online reading" I'll assume you mean without a PDF reader plugin on the client. In that case you'll need to convert to HTML
http://pdftohtml.sourceforge.net/
If you don't mind losing the ability to copy text then converting to PNG may give you a more accurate rendering
http://www.imagemagick.org/
Regardless of the output format you can manage your searching using the original PDF data. One technology for this is mnogosearch
http://www.mnogosearch.org/
Monogosearch uses pdftotext internally, you may find this useful if you want to write your own search routines. pdftotext is part of the Xpdf suite of utilities
http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/about.html
All of the tools listed above are available on Windows or Linux
You may also be interested in the Vuzit DocuPub Platform: http://vuzit.com/products/docupub_platform
The display technology itself is not open source, but they provide an API to access their service, so perhaps it is worth investigating.
Don't know if you are looking a software to install or some service to pay for...
I've read a lot about www.getbackboard.com (this is not advertising, only reporting something I've read about, that maybe fits your needs.. ;)
Not sure if they do annotations, but both of these will show PDFs quite well:
http://pdfmenot.com
http://docs.google.com
ICEPdf recently released their code as open source. It is Java based.
PyPdf is really nice. It supports reading the text as well as encryption which I know that itextsharp does not.
Of course you'd have to program in python as IronPython's class libraries aren't quite to the point where you can ref them from another language and use them. (But I imagine they will be someday soon)
PyPdf
This is not open source, but check it out anyways. You can download a free trial of their SDK to try it out. Reading PDF's and their annotations is not simple and I wouldn't trust a production app to open source decoders.
Here is an online demo.
http://www.atalasoft.com/ajaxannotations/default.aspx
Another good pdf reader is FoxitReader.