I want to create a user manual in A4 format for my programming tool, much like the example here. Is there any clean, well formatted open-src documentation XSL-FO Stylesheet that I can use as my template? It should have support to include
tables
code samples
images
You can try to use DocBook, powerful markup language for technical documentation.
For example, Special DocBook features, user-configurable parameters for XSL-FO output.
For using out of the box just apply docbook/fo/docbook.xsl to your valid docbook xml file.
Related
We are converting a sizeable document for hosting on ReadTheDocs. We weren't happy with the simple presentation enabled by Markdown table syntax, so we coded our tables as HTML. Very nice in the HTML viewer (e.g., the end of http://manual.cytoscape.org/en/latest/Command_Line_Arguments.html).
In the PDF version generated by ReadTheDocs, each of our tables is completely missing (see page 9 on https://media.readthedocs.org/pdf/cytoscape-working-copy/latest/cytoscape-working-copy.pdf).
Have we made a mistake by coding tables as HTML? Could we have taken a different route and gotten nice tables in both HTML and PDF?
Any advice would be helpful ...
Thanks!
I have not used ReadTheDocs myself, but from reading their Getting Started guide, I assume you are using Sphinx? While Markdown supports embedding raw HTML, Sphinx does not support converting it to other formats.
You should consider moving to reStructuredText (Sphinx's native markup format), as it is much more advanced than Markdown. It can even be extended with custom directives and roles, should you need this. But be sure to first check whether reStructuredText tables offer the flexibility you require. Pandoc can convert your Markdown files to reStructuredText.
I see you are using a table to document command line options. reStructuredText supports documenting command line options using option lists. In theory, you could change how option lists are represented in the output document, but this might not be easy to accomplish, especially for PDF output using LaTeX (shameless plug: using rinohtype for PDF output should make this much easier in the future).
Are there any PDF generators out there be it commercial or open source which can be used for research purposes? That i can use such as pdfnow.com or any standalone desktop apps which allow me to generate a PDF from a XML template. I have tried researching but there is allot of ambiguity going around.
Applidok is generating PDF based on an original (raw) PDF, a template definition and dynamic/user data (e.g. from a form): http://go.applidok.com/en/howitworks.gz.html
Template format there is JSON, not XML, but approach is the same.
I am writing an application that has to read and interpret data stored in some PDF files. The reading part is done but I am only able to get a dump of all the words on a page and not the format of the words. What I mean is that if I have to extract a table, I am getting the numbers in the table but not the markup which defines the table.
Further, there is some formatting used which displays a few of these numbers within parentheses (meaning that those numbers are negative) but the parentheses themselves are not part of the text. Hence, I am not able to distinguish between positive and negative numbers present in the PDF table!
How do you get the PDF markup along with the text? Is a PDF similar in structure to an XML with tags used to markup tables etc.? If not, then, is there a resource which describes the salient features of the PDF DOM?
I am using VBA and the Acrobat library (AcroExch etc.)
There is no such thing as "PDF markup" in the sense of HTML etc. A table in PDF cannot be distinguished from line art, other than by using OCR, which can be error-prone if the layout is complex. It is simply drawn using geometrical shapes, like in a vector-based graphics program.
"Is a PDF similar in structure to an XML with tags used to markup tables etc.?"
No, not at all.
And there is no such thing as a 'DOM' either. Google for a file named *PDF32000_2008.pdf*. The current PDF specification for v1.7 (ISO spec) is that file. You should be able to locate it on the Adobe website.
As omz stated, text inside PDF does not really have a structure. You can take a look on the specification here. However, for some very specific files, there is something called PDF Tags, or PDF Marked Content, which is fairly new, and it aims to give PDF documents some kind of structure. If you target this kind of files specifically, you might be able to achieve something. Take a look on chapter 10 (Document Interchange) of the Adobe's specification for further details.
Maybe what you want to achieve can be done with less effort and faster by using TET, the Text Extraction Toolkit made by the fine folks from pdflib.com ( http://www.pdflib.com/products/tet/ ) ??
AFAIR, the TET has some (limited) support for table detection as well....
In this case I have XML data source and external images files whole together representing products catalogue. The basic structure of XML document is following:
categories
subcategories
products
I'm looking for a tool to convert described data source to pdf document, preferably with basic navigation functionality and hierarchical structure. Probably I can do it writing XSLT stylesheet, or writing code in some script language for generating TEX document. Can anyone provide any good LaTeX style for product catalogue or open source tool for generating pdf catalogues?
I suggest you the famous iText Java pdf library generation.
You can load data from XML and generate any type of PDF.
You have to write Java classes to create these type of documents.
I'd use XSL-FO if I thought a transformation would work or iText if I was writing a Java app and expressing it in code worked better.
I want to be able to generate a highly graphical (with lots of text content as well) PDF file from data that I might have in a database or xml or any other structured form.
Currently our graphic designer creates these PDF files in Photoshop manually after getting the content as a MS Word Document. But usually, there are more than 20 revisions of the content; small changes here and there, spelling corrections, etc.
The 2 disadvantages are:
1) The graphic designer's time is unnecessarily occupied. The first version is the only one he/she should have to work on.
2) The PDF file becomes the document which now has the final revised content, and the initial content is out of sync with it. So if the initial content needs to be somewhere else (like on a website), we need to recreate it from the PDF file.
Generating the PDF file will help me solve both these problems. Perhaps some way in which the graphic designer creates a "Template" and then puts in tags/holders and maps these tags/holders to the relevant data.
Thanks :-)
There are some tools out there for doing this. XSL-FO is useful. Here is a tutorial for creating a pdf from xml (or xhtml) with cocoon. Also see Apache FOP.
You could format your SQL data as XML and still use the same templates this way.
I use the ReportLab python library for this. It could perhaps solve your problem, but you will need to do some work...
In the past I have written scripts that spit out LaTeX then used texi2pdf to solve this kind of problem.
Take a look at iReport and JasperReports at http://jasperforge.org.
iReport lets you design reports, and then you can either programatically fill it with the JasperReports library (Java), or just use iReport to manually create the report.
I have only used it for tabular data, but I don't think there would be any problem for other types of documents.
You could create a form and populate the entries programmatically using a pdf library like iText (Java).
You could look at doing the workflow in PostScript which is plain text that you can easily compose from fragments. Then you can use any free tool to convert to PDF.
Take a look at Prince XML. This tool allows to generate PDF based on XML or HTML and CSS.
A possible way is to use a template engine, like FreeMarker or StringTemplate: these are often used to generate HTML, but they are flexible enough to output any format, actually.
The problem is to make a PDF template, I suppose. Perhaps you can take a sample output and edit it to replace data with placeholders to be filled by the template engine. Might not be trivial!
Sounds like a job that SQL Server Reporting Services can handle quite easily.
Reporting Services allows you to query the data, define the layout, and export to PDF without any intervention. The PDF output can be distributed via email, stored on a file share, and accessed via a page on the report server.
It can handle XML data sources too.
Another approach to generating a PDF file from data is to use prawn, which is based on ruby. I was very pleasantly surprised by how much functionality is included in prawn. It may take some investment up front but this approach will give you a lot of flexibility.
You can combine CSStoXSLFO with XEP from RenderX for high quality output. With this solution you can merge XML data into an XHTML template, which is decorated with CSS. It can also generate charts with the fantastic JFreeChart library. CSS3 page media features are supported.