I'm pretty new to Visio but I'm trying to figure how I could possible design a stencil to snap to a connector marker on another stencil/shape.
I have looked into actually editing the connector itself too see how its designed. I'm wondering If I could recreate the Endpoint on a single location for a shape stencil. Which would snap into place on to the designated shape, when a user drags it on to the worksheet.
Would anyone have any ideas or pointers on how I could achieve this?
I found my solution here.
http://visiozone.com/?p=298
Pretty much I had to take a 1D shape (A line) and Adjust the parameters of its boundary box inside the master shape, then group it too get it to act like a 2d shape. After, I could edit the group and add the shape I wanted then. Deleting the line and adjusting the endpoints.
Highly recommend checking the link out. I hope this helps anyone out there with this issue.
I'm not sure why its really difficult to find information on Visio. Being a 19 year old program. Haha.
I am looking for an easy solution for the following problem:
I have to create variants of a document and export them as an image. This could be easily done with the MS Word Mail Merge, but I need the pixel positions of every text block in that document. The image as well as the pixel positions are input for an AI training.
At the moment I can think of several approaches:
Throw the MS Word Mail Merge output into an OCR and try to identify the positions of the text blocks by comparing them with the original text source.
Create the document with something like JS, Python or Visual Basic and save the exact positions of each inserted text block at the time of inserting.
Maybe use Visual Basic for Word to extract the text positions from the MS Word XML file that was created with the Mail Merge function.
Variant 1 seems to be overly complicated because it uses some kind of reverse engineering. Additionally, using an OCR even on a perfectly readible document can always be a source of error.
So variants 2 or 3 seem fine, but I don't know any libraries that fit the requirements and Visual Basic for Word is absolutely new territory for me.
I hope I described the problem well enough. If you want me to clarify something, please let me know.
I appreciate every idea and help! :)
Best Regards
Henrik
Seems like someone already dislikes my post. Please let me know how I can improve before voting me down..
Anyway, I may have found a way to realize variant 2. This stackoverflow post references a Github Gist that extends the Python Image Library. It offers a function to write text on an image and also set a maximum width for the text box. The function also returns the final width and height of the drawn text box. Using this I will try to implement an algorithm that creates the document images as well as the label files.
Maybe this will also help someone else looking for the same thing.
Sorry I can't embed images, I have the links instead (... I can only post two links. I have removed the http:// substring from some of the links).
I am looking to take an .csv file (really, any file, as I am generating this myself), and create a Visio (2010) diagram out of it. I have successfully imported the excel sheet to Visio, and can create some rough diagrams, but they are not enough. This is what I'm trying to create. Here are the following tactics I have tried, I prefer the VB method, but whatever works works:
Data Graphics: This is the closest I've gotten to a solution. Basically you create shapes and you can put data in it. Problem is, the style of display available are limited, as we can see here (imgur.com/clTLcxk). After importing the excel sheet, all I had to do was drag and drop to create these shapes. The closest I have gotten is here. However, I really need the outside box (or container, for aesthetic reasons). (Some information here [support.office.com/en-us/article/Enhance-your-data-with-data-graphics-45af64a4-1dcb-4463-9a7e-67709786181c])
VB: I have been using this (msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff959245%28v=office.14%29.aspx). I have ran some of the example code, but I am really lost. I have run some of the example code but the only one I have really gotten to work are useless to me. Also, I don't see any API methods that actually add data to these diagrams!
So how is this done?
I would approach this problem by first defining or finding Visio masters that would the data I'm drawing to the page. In your case it looks like you'd want a master for your Foo items, and one for your Bar items.
So then you'd step through your Bars, then within each Bar you'd have one or more Foos. For each Foo, you would drop that master out, and set the text of the shape to what you want in the blue Foo section (maybe a grouped sub-shape for the Foo master), and then text in the white body.
When stepping through all the Bars, you'd obviously have to drop out a Bar shape and position/size it to contain all the Foos.
I'm trying to use Excel to create AutoCAD drawings. I have a list of product numbers and I'd like to use VBA so that upon hitting a button it will find a block or a drawing file of every product on the list and paste them into an AutoCAD drawing (to a specific point would be a bonus).
So far I've found code that will read from two columns in Excel and will plot a polyline in ACAD using those columns as coordinates. It's very simple but not exactly what I want. Does anyone have suggestions or example code that does something similar? I've found some online using the "ThisDrawing." object but Excel isn't recognizing that so I've reached a stand still. I have all day tomorrow to work on it, so I'll be doing a lot more searching, but any help is definitely appreciated. Thank you
Autodesk provide free downloads on their website so that you can add the VBA IDE into AutoCAD.
Then, inside the AutoCAD IDE you start a new VBA project.
Add a reference to your Excel library so that you can read the Excel spreadsheet.
You need to look up on:
ThisDrawing.ModelSpace.InsertBlock
In the AutoCAD VBA manual. It tells you what various parameters. But they are straightforward - origin, scale, rotation, path to block.
When you call the InsertBlock routine it will create a AcadBlockReference object. You can do any further customization on that object.
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 :)