I am going to preface this with the question on a more general scale then go on to explain my specific issue.
Is there a way to create a word document, pdf, or anything comparable that I could add a "Record Audio" button to that would save the audio with the file as well as all the other info that might on a pdf/word form?
I know that Adobe Pro has a leave audio comment option, but I am creating this for a user and I do not want them to have to use that. The reason I need this is that I currently have a form usually gets partially filled out and then passed on with a dictation that needs to be transcribed at a later time. I am aiming to do this so that I can have the form and audio file linked and saved under one file.
If there is a way to leave the audio comment on a pdf with some javascript that is triggered by a button, I am perfectly okay with that I just have no clue how to program that (in terms of syntax, I am comfortable programming that isn't the problem lol).
I am also open to forms of documents other than pdf or word. I only mentioned these as they are the industry standard, but if there is another file type that would work around this, I am more than glad to use it!
I am using word 2013 by the way.
Thanks in advance!
You could write a TaskPane Addin that shows the audio controls. Once the recording is complete, the audio could be saved in the CustomXML parts in the document.
Then other users who receive the document and have your AddIn, will be able to listen to the recording.
I have not verified it in-depth, but it would be possible to add a button to the PDF file which creates a Sound annotation. The user should be then automatically asked (via a dialog) to record it.
So I've done my research, and it seems that in order to print documents from Visual Studio using VB, it's a very long and lengthy process of manually drawing every line, rectangle and String on the piece of paper.
Thing is, I sometimes need to print up to 20 pages at once, and there are several functions that require this. After spending a week on creating one such document manually, I've decided to ask two questions:
1) Is it possible to print from a HTML template instead, i.e. inputting a HTML String?
2) Barring that, is it possible to use VB to print from a document that's already existing? This way, I can look into the possibility of generating a document with a different language (hopefully HTML) and print that instead.
EDIT:
I am attempting to do this because the current printing capabilities of Visual Basic is too tedious (boxes and lines have to be drawn at specific x/y coordinates). I would like to speed up this process and hopefully use HTML with CSS styles to print. Is this in any way possible?
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.
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 :)
I have built an application that automates the filling out of form fields inside a pdf. It then takes various assets and combines them together to generate a "print ready" product. All of this is accomplished using the magic of iTextSharp. When form fields are populated, they are then flattened to text. The problem is that even with the fonts embedded they aren't really attached to the form fields in a meaningful way (like straight text elements are) and the printers are complaining that the pdf is generating licensing errors due to this. I researched this a bit and it just seems to be the nature of how form fields are.
The artists we are working with requested that we research a way to "outline" the text that is created from flattening the form fields. I found that running the PDF Optimizer with a custom preset allows for Text Outlining in Acrobat, and even better I can generate an Acrobat Sequence that runs this command on the pdf. The problem is that Sequences can not be automated, at all.
I found a plug-in called AutoBatch that allows for the execution of Sequences on the command line through a batch file. The downside is that this would require installing Acrobat Pro and the Plug-in on the server this application will be running on. Further it seems like an overkill solution just to outline the text in the pdf. For all I know at this point iTextSharp may allow me to do this programmatic, but searching for such a thing on google returns little results and nothing relevant.
So the question: Is there a better way to outline text in a pdf than the current solution I have implemented or am I kind of stuck?
TLDR; PDF is generated w/ non-standard fonts. I need to "outline" this text to send it to the printer. Currently using AutoBatch Acrobat Plug-In to execute Acrobat Sequence from the Command Line. Seems excessive, wondering if anyone knows a better way to automate font outlining.
I am also in a printing environment and have used forms for "Box Covers" plenty of times to shorten the code used to produce box covers.
I simple us "pdfStamper.FormFlattening = true;" and the printers (Xerox DP180 and DC5000) has no problems in using the PDF.
The moment I leave out FormFlattening the printer gives a lot of errors regarding the PDF.
If you are using FormFlattening then check if the printer has the font locally installed in order for it to reference the font from the print engine instead of the PDF resources.