This is a followup to svn or mercurial version control of word documents
I potentially want multiple non-programmers to be able to use version control on word documents. I can configure mercurial to look at the unzipped docx files. What I want is as follows:
Read from Docx files (answered in that question, using a feature of mercurial to unzip before comparing, awesome!
automatically merge documents whenever there are non-colliding changes. It appears from the previous answer that this is done using comparison tools.
programmatically run word on the two documents if there are collisions, comparing the two.
I have manually opened one file, then another in Word to see what it was like. On my word 2004, it seems a bit buggy, but I see from reviews that the feature is much improved in 2010.
I found this link:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/command-line-switches-for-microsoft-office-word-2007-HP010164010.aspx#BM1
for command lines, and now see that I can execute the command:
winword /q /f file1.docx /f file2.docx
The q is for quiet, /f specifies a file. The docs don't say if I can specify two files but I tried and it loads two in separate windows.
So the only thing I don't know is how to trigger word to compare the two.
Is the word interaction a fairly easy scripting job, or does it involve binary APIs that I don't want to know about, like DCOM, ActiveX, etc.
Digging around in the TortoiseHg directory, I found some examples of scripts implementing diff/merge of doc files in the diff-scripts directory. There is an [extdiff] section in Mercurial.ini that can be configured to use this scripts. This may get you started.
Related
Part of my job right now is to build some dynamic functionalities into Microsoft Office documents. The only means I've found to do this is through VBA - and thus, the VBA editor which comes built in to Office docs.
The VBA editor is awful. It's missing a million different functionalities that modern development environments need to support. But the worst part is that I'm a hard-core Vim lover, and the VBA editor is barely any better than notepad.
So: Is there any way I can effectively use Vim to do VBA programming? Short of copy-pasting my code into the VBA editor from a different window when I want to try it?
I've never used the VBA editor, but here's something I've done with MS Visual Studio. (MSVS's editor does have some nice features, but I still prefer vim for most editing.)
I open or create the source file in MSVS. I then get the full path to the file (by right-clicking on the tab and selecting "Copy Full Path"), and open the same file in vim in a different window.
I use alt-tab to bounce back and forth between vim and MSVS. When I make a change in vim, I use :w to write the change, then alt-tab back to MSVS. The MSVS editor notices that the file has changed on disk and offers to read the updated version.
Alternatively, if I change the file in MSVS, I write the file (File > Save ...), then alt-tab to vim and use :e! to read the updated file into the vim buffer.
There's no need to copy-paste the code, since both editors are operating on the same disk file. I just have to be very careful not to make changes in both vim and MSVS without writing the file to disk.
It's ugly, and it's not for everyone, but it works for me. Maybe it will work for you.
I use Cygwin, so it's actually a little more complicated; Cygwin programs, including vim, don't recognize Windows-style paths. I can do this:
vi $(cygpath 'WINDOWS_PATH')
where WINDOWS_PATH is pasted from the full path I get from MSVS. The single quotes are necessary to keep the shell from interpreting the \ characters. If you're using a Windows native vim, this step isn't necessary.
That's an interesting opinion. I used VI briefly about fifteen years ago and based on that I contend that the VBA editor is far more suited to its purpose than VI (or VIM?) would be. Is there one particular piece of functionality that it is missing from the VBA editor that precludes you effectively using it for its purpose (editing VBA)? VBA has not been enhanced for many many years, but the fact is it can't be killed off because everyone finds it so easy to use.
If you wish you can write some piece of code in your preferred language that manipulates your word document via COM objects (if it supports that). Then you can call your external piece of code from a simple stub within your Word document. You need to get around some security constraints though in your Word document.
For example I could write some code in VBScript or VBA or Powershell or .Net that manipulates a word doc. I can call that from a small piece of VBA (that might be attached to a button or something in the standard word toolbar)
I have some files which need reading using Access / VBA. They are compressed using ".gz" compression. How can I read those files in?
I figure this must be a solved problem but alas can't find anything. Command-line would be one option but it would involve the users of the VBA application having to have particular tools installed. Perhaps there is a library I can just include, which I can then ship with my VBA application (.accdr)?
There are quite a few libraries around, however, probably the most popular is zlib. A nice example using zlib, albeit written in VB6 (which shouldn't be too difficult to convert to VBA) is located here. One nice point about zlib is that it doesn't need registering (i.e. REGSVR*), so you should be able to drop it into the same folder as your DB (or even embed it into the DB then extract it automatically).
I currently have a directory with 98,000 individual archive transaction files. I need to search those files for user input strings and have the option to open the files as it finds them or at the end of the search. I'm using Notepad++ currently and, while functional, it's quite slow. I thought about writing my own, but I am only familiar with .NET and I'm a beginner. Also, I'm not sure how efficient that would be compared to NP++.
This tool would be used again and again so the dev time would definitely be worth it if it came to that. Is there some other tool out there that's already developed that would accomplish this?
Agent Ransack
I've been using it for years.
I recommend you using Astrogrep, a grep utility for Windows. You can open files as it finds them, and it shows you the line where the match was found, without having to open the file.
Assuming the archive transaction files are plain text, you can download CYGWIN which is an environment providing UNIX tools for Windows.
Once that's done, you can open a new Cygwin Bash Shell, then do cd 'c:\\foo' to get into the directory with your files, then do grep -F -r "my string" * to find your text. (The -F means it searches for that literal string as opposed to a regular expression and -r means recursive.)
Possibly overkill, but you could index the folder using Lucene, keep the index uptodate (as transaction files are added) and then searches will take trivial amounts of time, you can target the file, line and word number of each match for a given search string
I currently use Programmer's Notepad with the Rebol syntax scheme. It's not bad--does any insightful person have another suggestion?
For my Windows programming work I use the Zeus editor, but I'm not sure if it does Rebol?
Another windows option is TextPad. It is commercial but it is quite a useful editor.
There are 2 Rebol syntax files available from the official site
http://www.textpad.com/add-ons/synn2t.html
I also wrote a TextPad syntax file generator uploaded it to rebol.org
http://www.rebol.org/view-script.r?script=textpad-syngen.r
It is probably quite easy to modify this script to support other editors.
vim.
Especially with the following binding in your _vimrc/.vimrc:
nnoremap <Leader>fr :w<CR>:silent ! %<CR>
In normal mode, Leaderfr saves your current file and executes it: (fr is a memo for 'fast-run')
:wEnter save current file
:silent execute without messages: ! open shell % paste current file name Enter
Leader is usually \ key, I have this mapped to spacebar. In case anyone is interested on how to do that, post a comment.
Programmer’s Notepad better than Crimson Editor with Code Folding and Great Project Management
http://www.pnotepad.org/
It's opensource so you can even modify it in C++
For Windows, there is Crimson Editor or E with the REBOL bundle.
For Mac, there is TextMate.
Emacs, I believe has a REBOL syntax too.
Sublime Text is a really nice Windows editor (commercial, but reasonably priced) that supports TextMate configurations (well, at least for syntax and snippets) so if you manage to get a REBOL bundle from somewhere, you can use it with this.
SciTE also has REBOL syntax coloring support because the Scintilla editor component it's based on includes this.
Notepad++ should also support REBOL syntax coloring, being Scintilla based, but as it is currently distributed, the support is not compiled in. If you're so inclined, you could probably compile it yourself and add the support back in. It might be worth it because Notepad++ is quite a good editor too.
I can't include proper links because I don't have enough rep, but this should do:
www.sublimetext.com
www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html
www.scintilla.org/index.html
notepad-plus-plus.org
http://rebol.wik.is/index.php?title=Notepad%2b%2b
which is a REBOL plugin for Notepad++
I use JEdit which not only has REBOL syntax highlighting but also auto-indenting. It has most of the features you'd expect from a text editor (e.g. block selection, configurable keyboard shortcuts).
There are versions for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux so if you choose to work cross-platform you won't need to learn a new editor. The web page is Jedit.org1
I use UltraEdit.
with its advanced project, syntax highlighting, macro, command-line control and total keyboard shortcut configuration, per language and project, you can program the editor to do just about all of what you need at a single click of the mouse, or keyboard.
my setup starts rebol on any file, and assigns a launch "default project script " to a shortcut, so wherever I am in the files, I still launch the project's relevant script. change project, it will run that new project's scripts. another key for unit tests, another key for "find in all opened files, etc, etc..
also, the actual text-exiting, when combined with a few macros which create functions, objects, and more using the clipboard and "currently highlighted" text makes it much faster than any Visual IDE including MSVC.
ultra edit itself has thousands of other advanced features, and they all work... really they do.
I've tried other editors and they always fall short when I start to push them.
yeah, you have to buy it... but its cheap (like one or two hours of your life salary ;-)
so considering you might use it for several months or years... its a cheap investment.
also, ultra edit is now released on linux and the mac port is just around the corner.
I use EditPlus for several years, it is not free but not expensive. It has Rebol syntax highlighting file (downloadable from its web site).
It is especially useful & very fast if you work with huge files (over 100 mb) or with lots of files (say 300 files.), find & replace takes a second.
For syntax highlighting and a simple autocomplete, you can use http://komodoide.com/komodo-edit/.
It's free and open source with several nice features, including folder browsing while editing, which I personally find very useful.
There is also a bunch of other languages supported in case you want to take a closer look and give this editor a chance.
I'm going to have to write a number of vba modules for a project I'm working on, and would prefer to use SciTe to the built in editer in Office.
SciTe allows you to redirect the effect of hitting F1 to a arbitary command with the selected text as an argument. Is there anyway of using this functionality to search the relevant .chm files?
I'm guessing not, given that the help for vba is spread across multiple files, but I'm hoping someone can prove me wrong...
I'm especially interested if anyone can suggest a way to find out which chm file a particular libraries help resides, just from the fully delimitered name of the function.
Another approach is to use the HTML Help command line program HH.EXE to either show specific pages, or to decompile a particular CHM into HTML files.
Go to the folder mentioned by Lunatik in a command window and enter this command:
hh -decompile html vbaac10.chm
^^
# ac is for Access; use xl for Excel, wd for Word, etc
This will create an "html" folder below it and fill it with most of the files that went into creating the CHM file. The resulting HTML files can be opened directly in your browser, although they won't find their related style sheets or scripts which are addressed by their locations in CHM files. The style sheets and scripts do get extracted though so you can work with them too.
Also take a look at the XML files in the 1033 folder like VB_ACTOC.XML - this is the Table of Contents for the Access VBA help. It contains topic nodes with labels and urls for each item in the help file:
<topic>
<label>CheckBox Object</label>
<url>mk:#MSITStore:vbaac10.chm::/html/acobjCheckBox.htm</url>
</topic>
The mk:etc... url can be put on the HH command line to open that topic in a regular HTML Help window. Also, it shows the source CHM filename, and the relative path of the file when decompiled.
hh mk:#MSITStore:vbaac10.chm::/html/acobjCheckBox.htm
Working from these files, you could put together a script to find/grep files by keyword and show them in a browser, or you could reengineer the files into some sort of database or other lookup capability to work with SciTe's command based help system.
Some sites with more info about using HH.EXE:
HTMLHelp command-line
tips on using the HH command line and links to other sites
KeyHH 1.1
an alternate/supplemental program to HH.EXE for working with CHM files
The main files are held (for Office 2003 anyway) in Program Files\OFFICE11\1033, but accessing pages within them could be a bit tricky as Microsoft have gradually had to reign in the ability to delve into CHM files over the years due to security concerns.
This page (download) has some good info on what might still be possible as far as linking to specific pages inside a CHM
Having said that, I don't think this file is the default help shown to most users nowadays, but it's close enough, missing only the Office 2007 pimping most of the time. The online help seems to be set as default unless you specifically disable it during the Office install. The URLs are, I think, not very SEO friendly so couldn't be guessed. I suppose you could borrow a sneaky trick from scammers and craft URLs that point to the top link on Google, thusly: Range.
EDIT: Google cache link?
Inspired heavily by Lunatik's answer, adding:
command.help.$(file.patterns.vb)=http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&newwindow=1&q=site%3Amsdn.microsoft.com+%222003+VBA%22+$(CurrentWord)
command.help.subsystem.$(file.patterns.vb)=2
to my vb.properties file gives me a reasonable work around (loads a Google search results page with search criteria of:
site:msdn.microsoft.com "2003 VBA" $(CurrentWord)
Obviously no guarantees of it taking me to a helpful page, but then the inline help in the VBA editer isn't all that reliable on that one either...
Can anyone who knows SciTe better suggest a more elegant solution?