I am looking to create and save either a rtf, doc or docx file on an iPad (iOS).
The scenario is that we'd like to assist a user in creating content on their iPad and then let them email this as an editable document cross-platform (OS X, WIN).
I am open to other solutions besides the rtf, doc or docx file format.
Thanks,
James
RTF is going to be the easiest, because it's a plain text format. It's kind of like HTML, but without closing tags. Here is a class for writing an RTF, but it requires a lot of dependencies from elsewhere in the framework.
DOCX would be rather difficult. It's actually a zip file, containing a few XML files. You can examine the format yourself by changing the .docx extension to .zip and unzipping it. But even though XML is a fairly easy to write format, the way the text attributes are organized is still rather complicated. Also, I recall that it has to be zipped in a very specific way to be read properly.
As for DOC, it will be very difficult because it's such a complex format. You could look into some open source projects, like Abiword or Word2x. Be careful using their code because the licenses may not agree with the App Store rules.
I've seen doc & docx readers for iPhone (App store entry linked here), but I don't know of any open source frameworks you can make use of.
RTF format should be pretty simple to write, if you're up to the challenge. There is no built in framework support for it (here's a related question, b.t.w.).
Maybe you could write out something in a regular TEXT format and e-mail that?
Docmosis has a cloud service that you can reach from iOS. You can ask it to render a doc in various formats (doc, rtf, pdf, odt etc) and email it off or stream it back - though you have to be connected. Previewing DOC on iOS is possible but a little flaky. One option is to stream PDF back for display on iOS and email editable document (which can be done in one call).
Related
I have a PDF (created from Word) for a game I wrote for an old 8-bit computer, and I'd like to embed the code for that game (binary, less than 32k) into that PDF. This way, my emulator can load the program by reading the PDF, and the two can be stored and shared in one file.
You could call this a form of steganography.
I know a PDF has a tree structure and uses ASCII to define its components; is there a way to add inert, "orphan" elements that won't cause problems for PDF readers? I think that would be the easiest way to do it. But I'm not sure how to do it.
The simplest solution would be to use a document attachment or a file attachment annotation.
Most PDF tools that are available support these features as they are pretty basic.
Does anyone have any suggestions for generating RTF, PDF and MS XML reports from XCODE ?
I was thinking of creating some Objective-C classes to help do this but no doubt some may already exist.
To answer my own question...
Subclass NSDocument and generate formatted text using NSAttributedString, NSTextBlock, NSParagraphsStyle and so on...
Add the attributedString to the NSDocuments textStorage.
Add some methods to NSDocument to provide the list of supported output formats available from NSAttributedString to the Save As dialog.
It's not simple but works OK and can be used to generate formatted documents.
Things I can't figure out how to do are the following:
Make use of RTF \stylesheets so that MS Word picks up the styles used
by the different programs.
Creating new Sections, Chapters and Pages (e.g. RTF tag \page)
Creating Headers and Footers.
If anyone knows whether any of these are supported by the Apple text system please let me know. I can do this with custom RTF generator but would prefer to stick to standard API's if they exist.
Thanks
I am trying to make an iOS app which would extract plain text from a pdf file and display it in a UITextView. Its simply not a pdf reader to view a pdf file but i would later wish to perform certain operations on that text.
I have already googled a lot but still not able to get an exact solution.
i already tried using https://github.com/zachron/pdfiphone
but the files are using ARMV6 architecture which seems obsolete with xcode 4.5
And if anyone can suggest some exact and non-confusing code using Quartz-2d framework of iOS then it would be great.
Here is An Sample code to Extract text from PDF Hope this Might Help You.
https://github.com/zachron/pdfiphone
This is a library to get the text out of a PDF for the iPhone.
Another Demo is there Which uses OCR technology find the link below
https://github.com/nolanbrown/Tesseract-iPhone-Demo
Also Check this page of the Quartz 2D Programming Guide, it covers everything you need to open and parse a PDF file in iOS. Note that it is not a simple task, since there's no method to extract the full text in one line. You have to work with the data as an input stream, using a CGPDFScanner
Two Other Libraries
https://github.com/KurtCode/PDFKitten/
https://github.com/mobfarm/FastPdfKit
This question comes up all the time. It is VERY hard to extract text from PDF in general. The PDF specification is not designed with text extraction in mind. There are many libraries that try to do the job, essentially by reconstructing the text from the geometric placement of the individual glyphs. These libraries have varying degrees of success, but will all fail on certain PDF documents. In fact, some PDF documents have Glyphs but no way to associate the glyph with a character. For these documents it is simply not possible to extract text, short of using some kind of OCR approach.
PDF is designed as a read-only format that is portable in the sense that a PDF document will be rendered identically on any platform. That is what it is best at, and what it should be used for.
If text is to be edited, do not use PDF.
Here (Extracting text from pdf using objective-c), I found an answer to your question and it works. But not so fine as i need it :(
it can extract only ascii
it return me only one paragraph
Good luck.
In iBook, when you open a PDF, you can auto format and paged the pdf, e.g. if in iPhone, there are 5 pages, but when you view with iPad, it only contains 2 pages.
When you change the text size, the page also updated automatically.
How to do this using CGPDFDocumentRef?
I'm assuming you are talking about Apple iBooks on the iPad? Are you sure you are observing the behavior of a PDF and not an ePub file?
The native format of iBooks is either ePub or the format created by iBooks Author.
PDF files are usually (in the vast majority of cases) used in a non-reflowing way. Reproducing the exact visual appearance of pages - explicitly without reflow - is exactly why PDF was invented.
There are constructs you can add to PDF files to make them a little more alike to formats like HTML and ePub; these constructs can tag text with styles, logically define paragraphs, columns and tables and so on. Usually they are used to make a PDF file suitable for long-time archiving (according to the ISO PDF/A standard) or accessible (suitable for reading by screen-reader software for vision-impaired people for example). Such a PDF file is commonly referred to as a tagged PDF.
As far as I know iBooks doesn't actually support tagged PDFs (meaning, it doesn't use the information in such a PDF file to reflow the file). And as far as I know you cannot create the necessary tags and structure with the built-in iOS library.
If your target app is iBooks, you'd probably be better off looking into generating ePub...
I've already referred to this SO post. I've been embedding images using an AlternateView for PNG files. Now I'm wondering how to do it with PDFs.
Should it work, for the LinkedResource, to just say:
Dim document As New LinkedResource(pdfFilePath, "image/pdf")
I'm just trying to figure out how to get the PDF to be embedded like I could with an image, or is that not possible and I'll have to do it as an attachment?
You can embed images since they can be rendered in place by an email client. PDFs cannot do that, so I'd recommend either having a thumbnail of the PDF that links to your web site with the actual PDF. Or just attach the PDF to the email message.
There are a few options that I know of.
1) Is the simplest way okay? The easiest by far would be to attach the PDF as a normal attachment. Then render the first page of the pdf as an image, embed it in the email and link it to open the PDF if you can. Entourage kind of does this on the Mac.
Alternatively, what I found was the following:
2) FLASHPAPER embedded in HTML displaying a PDF. Adobe has a technology called Flashpaper. It is a flash based file viewer. You can use flashpaper format documents that go into it, or PDFs as the source.
Check out some examples. That's really flash. http://www.adobe.com/products/flashpaper/examples/
Assuming you send an HTML email that will get through (images aren't turned off, etc), you can can embed the Flashpaper viewer right in your HTML code as a normal Flash object.
Most HTML email clients use Internet Explorer Bits, Webkit bits, or Gecko bits to render the html. Flash player is pretty well installed on everything, so it works well. A good example of this is when we open an email and it has video playing in it. It's almost always Flash.
I have had luck doing it this way -- the only thing you'd have to decide is if most of your clients can see this and how much (if any) today's software might block it.
What I ended up doing was a hybrid. 1) Attach it to the email, 2) Embed the Flashpaper viewer. They get it either way.
Flashpaper is available seperately for $75. It has come in handy where the client was not able to install adobe acrobat on each computer and it had to be 100% web based.
I would imagine you should be able to do the same using any language with a little more effort and using something like Flashpaper.
Hope that helps
This is not possible--at least not in a way that will work with many clients. You'll need to just attach the file.
If you have only one client to worry about, it might be possible--but not likely without manually changing settings on each client.
The MIME type of a PDF is "application/pdf" not "image/pdf"