Most Adobe products have the ability to be automated using AppleScript or ExtendScript/JavaScript but I don't seem to see the same capabilities in Edge Animate. Maybe I'm just missing something. I'm looking to be able to do things like open the document, add images, save the document, etc. Has anyone been able to find anything like this? I've done a number of different searches to no avail.
I'm not exactly sure what you're asking, but I think you're talking about adding your own javascript, which can be done by clicking the curly brackets located next to any of the elements in the animation, or hittin ctrl+E to see the full code.
Second, in terms of opening the document, you should be able to just double click the an file that it creates, and saving the document is just like in any other program, file>save(as).
Adding images is as simple as file>Import (hotkey = ctrl + I).
not exactly what I was asking for, but I did end up finding a solution. I was looking for a mechanism to be able to control Edge Animate similar to how you can control InDesign, Photoshop, and Flash via VBScript, and JavaScript respectively. This allows you to do things like import images into your document from an external script, save the document, export contents, etc. In the end, I wrote some code that sends key-strokes to the application and that resolved the problem although not ideally, IMHO. Thanks for your responses, though.
Related
I'm curious how to make an accessible button for screen readers which downloads PDF.
I know that there is an option using href and pass there an URL to the pdf file, and even a download attribute inside an anchor to open a download window.
But it's not a good way for a screen reader. The screen reader reads it as a link but actually, this is not a link because it triggers downloading a pdf file rather than redirect to another page. So this can be confusing for people with vision disorders who rely on their screen readers.
Is it a good accessibility way to create such a button? Or relying on <a href='path-to-pdf'>...</a> is completely enough and not confusing for people with disabilities ?
General answer and basics of file download
Both a link and a button are perfectly fine, it doesn't make much difference.
IN any case, it's very important to explicitly indicate that the link or button is going to download a file rather than open a page, to avoid surprise.
The simplest and most reliable is just to write it textually, i.e. "View the report (PDF)".
You may also put a PDF icon next to the link to indicate it, but make sure to use a real image, i.e. <img alt="PDF" /> and not CSS stuff, since the later may not be rendered to screen readers and/or don't give you the opportunity to set alt text (which is very important).
A good practice is also to indicate the file size if its size is big (more than a few megabytes), so that users having a slow or limited connection won't get stuck or burn their mobile data subscription needlessly.
It's also good to indicate the number of pages if it's more than just a few, so that people can have an idea on how big it is, and if they really can take the required time to read it.
Example: "View the report (PDF, 44 pages, 17 MB)"
Note that similarly, that's a good practice to indicate the duration of a podcast or video beforehand.
Additional considerations with PDF
First of all, you should make sure that your PDF is really accessible. Most aren't by default, sadly.
You should easily find resources on how to proceed to make a PDF accessible if you don't know.
Secondly, for an accessible PDF files to be effectively read accessibly, it has to be opened inside a real PDF reading program which supports tagged PDFs, like Adobe Reader.
The problem is that nowadays, most browsers have an integrated PDF viewer. These viewers usually don't support tagged PDFs, and so, even if you make an accessible PDF, it won't be accessible to the user if it is open inside that integrated browser viewer.
So you must make sure that your link or button triggers an effective download or opening in a true PDF reading program, rather than opening in an integrated viewer of the browser.
Several possibilities that may or may not work depending on OS/browser to bypass the integrated viewer. They have to be tested to make sure they work:
Send a header Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="something.pdf"
Send a Content-Type different than "application/pdf" or "text/pdf", e.g. "application/octet-stream" to fake out basic type detection
Make the link don't ends with .pdf
Use the download attribute of <a>
The most reliable are response headers. Most browsers don't rely only on file extension alone to decide what to do.
Either a link or a button is fine. The most important thing is that the user is informed about what the element does - i.e. it downloads/opens a PDF file. So, this should be reflected in the element's label, whether that is a visible text label or an icon that uses alt text or aria-label to explicitly describe the element's purpose.
I agree with Quentinc's suggestion to also inform the user upfront about the number of pages and size of the document - that's a nice touch that I don't see very often!
PDF accessibility is a whole other topic, but again as QuentinC points out, there's not much good in allowing a user to download or view a PDF that isn't accessible, so it's a good idea to ensure the PDF has been tested against JAWS/NVDA/VoiceOver/TalkBack to ensure it is readable.
I am currently using an excel macro (although I will switch to VB.NET if necessary) to loop through all of the text in a PDF and populate an array with certain portions of the text in the PDF (via the Adobe SDK and getPageNthWord). This part is working just fine, but now what I want goes a step further.
There are certain portions of the PDF where just grabbing the text isn't giving the full picture, and I'd like to see what more I can get. This is exactly the screenshot or snippet I am trying to get:
So, I know that I could use getPageNthWordQuads to find the coordinates for the words "Compliance Warning" and I could figure out a way to find the bottom right of the screen as well, but my problem starts there. After I get those coordinates what would I do with them? Can I zoom in the PDF to only see that portion and then take a screenshot? I already have the code for a screenshot of the activewindow, but I don't know how to scroll or zoom on a PDF.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. A fresh approach would be welcome as well. Thanks!
There are probably a number of approaches that would work - I don't know enough about your environment / constraints to know for sure which would work best. I'm assuming you are talking to Acrobat through OLE here.
1) You can open a window, get its AVPageView and ask it to zoom and move to where you want it to do your thing.
2) You can open a PDF document in one of your own windows using OpenInWindowEx and then grab the contents of that window (the advantage being that this window could be off screen).
3) You can use the DrawEx method (in AcroExch.PDPage) to render a specific portion of a page into your own window and then process that.
I'd like to extract all of the information (formatted text, images, etc) from powerpoint slides into a flowing, readable (MS Word-style) format.
I'm not interested in keeping the slide concept at all--think of taking class slides from a college course and batch converting them all into one collective study guide.
I can't find a way to do this within powerpoint (though if you know of one, please share!) and,
I don't have experience scripting Office apps. Is this kind of thing easily done? Does this kind of script already exist somewhere?
Clarification:
In an earlier version of this post, I used the word "flowing" to refer to a slide-free (MS Word-like) format. This does not, however, refer to the actual formatting of slide content. So keeping bullet lists, etc. is fine and even desirable.
I don't see this being a simple task. College professors use a format of either "TITLE: BULLET POINTS OR IMAGE" or "EVERY WORD I'M ABOUT TO SAY" for their slides in my experience, and you're just not going to get flowing, readable text from the former no matter what you do. For the latter, you've already got your text, you just have to copy it to another document.
I think you might as well just open the PowerPoint, select all the text, and copy+paste into Word/Publisher/InDesign/your favorite page layout program. You'll have the same effect and the same amount of editing after the fact except without all the hassle of writing a program to do it for you.
Doing a Print operation to a PDF with the N-up options might be a good solution for handouts if that's all you need. You could expand the idea and condense ALL the slide decks into one, get it printed (with N slides per page and the note space next to it) and bound, and voila, instant study guide. I've seen that, and then you get options for note taking.
More power to you if you're doing this just because you can - don't let me stop you. There is much good learning to be had that way. You might want to look into writing a program using the Microsoft.Office.Interop namespace in .NET (starting at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb772069.aspx ), or perhaps look on CPAN ( http://search.cpan.org/search?mode=all&query=powerpoint ) and do it with Perl! There are lots of ways to do it, but you've got to be up for the challenge.
Text is fairly simple to extract, but what text do you want? The text from the title and body text placeholders only? File, Save As, and choose to save the outline.
The other text on the slide? That can be pulled out to a text file programmatically, but in what order? Suppose you have a complex diagram with text callouts. Extracting the text is going to give you gibberish. There's no obvious/meaningful order to the text other than what the human viewer supplies by noting that "Ah. The arrow next to this bit of text points to the fribulator sub-assembly, so must relate to it in some way." Try doing that in code. ;-)
You could give the author a way to sort the text into reading order so that the code knows what order to extract it in, but that would require a fair amount of work on the part of the author.
If you can be certain that all of the content is in title+bullet form, no worries. Otherwise, you'd have to be able to articulate exactly what you want extracted, in what form and in what order before you could get anywhere with this.
MS Word-style is not only readable, but writeable as well (which was not specified in your requirements). If you want a read-only guide, PDF is your natural choice (either through Acrobat Distiller or LibreOffice). Combine individual Acrobatted presentations with PDFtk, or Acrobat or Foxit and you're good to go without any programming at all.
"Is this kind of thing easily done?" - Yes, your humble servant did a couple of similar scripts ages ago (extracting enhanced metafiles from Powerpoint slides).
"Does this kind of script already exist somewhere?" - Yes. Probably at hundreds of places, but not sure if any of them get posted to the 'Net. All things considered think you'd be better off learning some scripting and macro programming on your own, since a ready-made script may be not quite fit for your needs - and to understand and rewrite it you'd need more time than to code & debug from scratch.
Since you mention that title+bullet form is ok, open the file, choose to save as and pick Outline as the save-as type.
I think you could parse through the PowerPoint file for formatting, text and pictures. There are Visual Studio namespaces available for such a task. You open the file, parse through it and make Word file from these. Complicated work, as you would have to consider type of elements and their position, you would have to use a temporary structure for each slide.
Have a look at this sample code :
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/gg278331.aspx
How to: Get All the Text in All Slides in a Presentation
Basically, using c# and openXML SDK 2.0, it loops through all the slides in the presentation, and then adds each text in every slide into a string builder. You can write out the result into a text file if you like (modification required).
Recommendation: <25 oct 2012>
For your study guide, maybe you could extract all the text in each slide, and dump those text programmatically (by adding that function into the sample code above while it's iterating the slides) into the "Notes" section of each slide. With that, you can print it in Notes Page view. You'll get the entire slide image at the top half of the page, and the actual slide texts at the bottom of it in the Notes Page view. It sure beats trying to copy and paste all the text from the slide into the notes section. You can even print it 2 slides per page, as small text would not be an issue inside the slide's image, and diagrams would still be visible more or less.
Unfortunatly, this method works for simple standard slide format ... meaning, it's OK if your slides just have a title, and a center text box with all the bullet points... any complex slide layout (maybe text boxes scattered everywhere) will come out in non-order and will be confusing. But at least you can still look at the slide image above to make sense of it :)
Here's a tough one:
I need to be able to find a word's position and size (its frame) on the screen (its first occurence is enough, from there I should be able to get the next ones).
For example, I would like to be able to detect word positions in (but not limited to) Word, Excel and PowerPoint for Mac, as well as Safari and others.
The solution should be as fast as possible; I should be able to find at least 5-6 words per second and use as little CPU time as possible.
Here's what I thought of so far:
OCR in a window's screenshot / graphics context (any good Open Source framework that works on Mac OS X 10.4 and that can be used in a commercial product?). Evernote is very good at spotting words in images. I don't know if it uses a custom in-house engine or an Open Source / commercial one but that would be the kind of engine I would like to use if this is a "valid" solution. Ideally I would detect the word's frame in the active application's window (how to get the frame of another application?).
Getting some kind of "hook" on Quartz drawing of text and intercepting the location of the word when it's drawn (does not seem very feasible at first glance!).
AppleScript, but it depends a lot on what API the application offers (I don't think you can get a word's coordinates in a Word document from what I've seen) and it's slow.
... out of ideas ...
My goal is to get all the word's frames in a paragraph in the right order based on a string containing the text of the paragraph.
Thanks in advance for any hints!
As a starting place, you may want to take a look at QuickCursor's code. It retrieves text from many different applications through the AX Accessibility APIs. Now, it won't grab the pixel placement of the word, but it will at least return the NSString associated with the text in that UI element. Of course this means that the app in question has to support these APIs; I don't know if the MS Office suite would. In addition, it only supports editable elements, so an un-editable webpage in Safari won't work either. But it may give you a starting point for some ideas.
Take a look at the QCUIElement.{m,h}, and then the implementation in the QCAppDelegate.m (beginQuickCursorEdit:)... the implementation of his abstracted QCUIElement seems to be as simple as:
QCUIElement *focusedElement = [QCUIElement focusedElement];
id value = focusedElement.value;
Edit: Aha! Check out the Accessibility Inspector Sample code: UIElementInspector. It can actually get the AXPosition of elements on a page. Now, it's not word-by-word, but we're getting closer. It'll tell you the x,y placement of a textblock, as well as the words contained in the textblock.
This is possible, but very hard to get working reliably. You can play with Spell Catcher's Direct Connect feature to see an example.
I am trying to identify the right tool, language, software package, or other for the automated development of presentations, where the presentation is user interactive.
The presentation will consist of images with titles and some descriptive text. Most of the time there will be 35–70 images. I would like to show each image on a separate page, slide, tab, etc. (I guess proper terminology depends on the solution.)
The images will change, but the titles will remain the same, and there will be a little bit of change to the description of each image.
After putting the presentation together, I would like the user to be able to circle and "write" on the electronic image in kind of the wax pencil sense (I previously worked in a photo lab and we worked with wax pencils on negatives all the time and would like to have kind of a similar flexibility). Moreover, I would like users to be able to add comments as well, kind of in the way Adobe PDF Professional allows, e.g. inserting bubble comments, etc.
Most importantly, I would like to be able to do this in an automated way. Right now we are using PowerPoint, but the amount of time it is taking to put an image on a slide in PowerPoint, resize it, and then set up the text is killing us. Plus, as the images change it takes tons of time to go back and update them. Thus, we would like something that is a bit faster to update images and get the feedback from our few users. Does not necessarily have to be a web hosted solution, but could be run through a browser.
Sorry this is so long and thanks for any ideas and feedback, especially if there is an existing software package solution, language that can be used, or other approach to get this done.
These days, two of the most popular are Adobe Captivate and Articulate Presenter. For service, instead of product, you can check out services like http://voicethread.com.
I don't know of any product that completely answers your requirements.
But, for similar results I use two different tools for developing the presentations and another one for drawing while presenting.
If I just want to make a presentation made of pictures and texts, and I want to automate its creation, I use irfanview http://www.irfanview.com/ with its wonderful feature for automated slideshows. I put all the images together, annotate them (I use either their filenames, or if not enought, with EXIF and comment fields) and create a slideshow, that can be compiler into an .exe file.
If I want a more elaborated presentation. With full annotation capabilities, I use Wink http://www.debugmode.com/wink/
For drawing over the screen during the presentation, I use a very old bitmap drawing program, called PC-Draw, that allows, with a hotkey, to capture the screen as a bitmap and begin drawing over it, and with another hotkey, to return to the original screen without altering the running programs at all. I have not found it anywhere in the web. However, I found similar programs just a quick google away.
All three tools are free and easy (and even fun) to use.