Well,
The title pretty much says it all. I have a set of ODS spreadsheets and I want to run some SQL queries over these spreadsheets and save the result on CSV files.
I know I can do that from the GUI, but I need to be able to do it from a batch file that will be run on a regular basis.
Solutions that make use of OpenOffice/LibreOffice Basic are acceptable, as well as solutions that require the use of some (free) plug-in.
Thanks in advance.
You could first convert .ods files into .csv files and do what you have to do on .csv files (insert in a real database, read it as plain text, etc.).
libreoffice --convert-to csv *.ods
I have several pdf files (about 20) and very month or so I need to change spme fields with new data. This is a very time consuming task and would like to know if there is an easy way via some sort of application where users can change the name of the variables that have to be stored into the different pdf files. This would be an enormous time saver. thanks for any help.
there are lots of solutions for this.. if you are willing to write some code things can get really interesting.
a simple solution would be to create a template pdf file with placeholder fields (like #{name}, #{age} etc.,), when a new pdf needs to be created using new values you can simple use itest to edit the pdf & replace the placeholders with actual values.
you can also use jasperreports for this but it would be an overkill for just 20 odd documents.
if you are interested in a sample program i'd be happy to provide you one.
If you have form fields in the PDF file then you may use Aspose.Pdf (.NET or Java version) to fill data into those fields programmatically. You can either fill the fields using individual values or import the data from the XML/FDF/XFDF files etc. You can take a template PDF and save the output PDF files with different values. Please see if this might help in your scenario.
Disclosure: I work as developer evangelist at Aspose.
Someone knows how can I create one pdf file from multiple ppt files ?
Whether it to write script or computer program. However if it can be done with some program it will be the best.
I searched the web for something like this but I didn't get any results.
If you want to convert the PPT/PPTX files to PDF and then join those converted PDF files into a single PDF using either .NET or Java, you may try Aspose.Slides and Aspose.Pdf.Kit components.
Aspose.Slides allows you to convert the PPT/PPTX files to PDF and Aspose.Pdf.kit allows you to join the PDF files into a single PDF. Please see if this solution can work for your scenario.
Disclosure: I work as developer evangelist at Aspose.
Is there any way to generate PDF files from classic ASP? I have a bunch of user-entered data that needs to be turned into a PDF that the user can download. How can I do this? OpenOffice allows exporting documents to PDF, so could this somehow be leveraged?
I played around a bit with this (Persits ASPPDF): http://www.asppdf.com/
Maybe running an external application that could be using CrystalReports... and you just pass it as an xml?
That's how i would do it... (lazy mode)
See a full list of PDF components here: http://www.aspin.com/home/components/document/pdf Many of them are free.
It is also possible to use XSLT to output PDF but I am not sure if this is supported by the Microsoft XML Parser. I remember there were something stopping me when I tried to do this 3-4 years ago. Might be worth checking out know depending out the type of data you have as source.
However if these are static files or a one time job consider using a PDF converter on your computer and just upload the files to the server. There are heaps of tools for this, including Adobe Acrobat.
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.