XAML in WPF to tiff or eps - xaml

I am wondering if it is possible to create tiff/eps image from XAML in WPF.
We are looking for printing high resolution images from existing XAML in WPF.
Please let me know if you have any suggestions.

Depending on what exactly you're trying to do you might want to look at the xsl-fo stuff. The goal of creating printable markup is the same but fo uses xml instead of xaml. Depending on your requirements you might be able to create xsl-fo directly instead of xaml. If not, I'm pretty sure you can find xaml to svg translators (there are lots that go from svg to xaml) and I know that xsl-fo can handle svg. For the last step of taking the xsl-fo to tiff I've used the Ecrion software but I'm sure there are others by now that also do a good job. Hope that helps...

Related

Inkscape objects lose transparency when saved as a PDF

I've seen a number of issues dealing with saving inkscape drawings as anything other than a svg but haven't seen a discussion specifically about transparent objects in PDFs. What's happening is that when I export a png any transparent object looks fine but if I save it as a PDF or eps the transparency is lost.
I've created an example which you can see at this link ( http://imgur.com/a/ieVuu )
I've looked at a lot of other posts and feel like the explanation to this is layered within the responses but I'm a beginner and can't read between the lines to understand it. I wanted to just ask why this is happening and what can be done about it directly?
Use Alpha Channel to set the transparency instead of Opacity option.
Typically this is an issue with the pdf printing program that you are using. Perhaps it's a configuration issue, perhaps it's just not advanced enough to handle it.
Try out several other programs that can print to pdf and see if you can find one that works for your use case.

Curve Texblock in XAML / W8.1 throughTemplate?

Is it possible to access the TextBlock Template to change the border and make it curved?
I tried editing the Template through Blend but with no success.
I'm trying to achieve something like this (couldn't get that given solution working):
Curve TextBlock in Windows 8
I'm trying to do this in C#/XAML - WINRT (Windows 8.1)
I don't think a TextBlock has a template you could modify. It's probably just some parameters used to tell DirectWrite what text to render and with what properties. The easiest way to solve it is when your text is constant to just break it apart into multiple single letter TextBlocks and lay them out on a path using Blend or Illustrator. If don't control what text can show up on the path - you'd have to code up the layout algorithm. Chris's link seems like a good place to start.
There isn't a clean way to do this directly in Xaml. Like Filip says, you can approach it by breaking the letters apart. That can work well for long sentences with small letters, but can be pretty chunky with large or connected letters. If you need smoother rendering then you can interop to Direct2D.
MSDN has a Direct2D animated text on a path sample which you could combine with the XAML SurfaceImageSource DirectX interop sample

Converting pdf to vector image

I'm trying to use pdf content (mathematics) in my webpage. I basically want to convert the pdf to some vector image. Converting the pdf to swf does the job very well, but as flash isn't supported on every platform, I'm trying to find another solution.
I read about svg, but as those pdf's contain a lot of mathematics, the result of the converters I found is really ugly and incorrect.
I've also thought about retyping the latex, and displaying it using mathjax, in some way this is the best solution, but also very time consuming.
The only thing I want is to convert it to a nice vector image, I don't want to change the content, or anything else. Besides converting to swf or retyping it, is there any other solution ?
Edit:
this is svg output
and here original pdf
The only solution I could find is illustrator.
Just open the pdf, save as svg, and choose to embed all used glyphs.
Result is perfect:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/58922976/Sol-10.1.svg
what about using flash + raster image in case of platform without flash, if flash mostly works for you?
Your PDF is a little difficult for reasons that are probably not apparent to you.
The core problem with it is that some of the graphics in the document are actually drawn using custom glyphs. You can see this if you copy and paste the text out of Acrobat. There are a variety of unusual characters in there that don't seem to serve any useful purpose. That's those squares at the bottom of your SVG with EEs and FFs in them.
However these characters are actually custom glyphs for things like the braces around the matrices at the bottom of the page. So they are both fairly important and also very specific to this document.
I tried ABCpdf .NET to convert your PDF to SVG. It worked fine apart from these custom glyphs at the bottom. The output was about 90KB. It looked very similar to your inkscape SVG output but just a bit smaller (the inkscape one is 160KB).
The only way to get rid of these non-Unicode glyphs is to vectorize the text. I did this using ABCpdf and the output looked fine in SVG. But... vectorized text is big and SVG isn't a particularly efficient medium. The output was about 1MB! Zipped it goes down to half that but it's still no-where near as efficient as the original PDF.
The problems I am seeing here are going to be universal whatever format you use. These custom characters are always going to be problematic whether you output to SVG, SWF, HTML canvas, VML or indeed any vector format.
So what would I suggest? Well the obvious vector format that is widely used on the web is... PDF!
I know it's not quite what you're looking for but I think this is the realistic solution given the constraints above. :-)

A better file format than PDF or EPUB?

My client wants us to build a custom document viewer for their app. (It really, truly needs to be custom, because there are a ton of application-specific features they need.)
We built one for them last year that took PDFs, generated page images, and backed the images using a hidden layer of text that could be selected and copied. We did it in Flex. It was a nightmare. PDF is horrid.
This year, we need to build one in HTML 5 with similar requirements, except that most of the documents now are in Word or HTML, that is, they have reflowable text, instead of the fixed layout and glyphs of PDF. But they still want to do PDF in the same viewer.
I'm thinking that we need to convert all documents to some common file format that can handle both reflowable text and also the fixed-position glyphs of PDF. (Each document would probably support one or the other, but not both). It would be nice if it were an XML-like markup language that would say:
<text>here's some text</text>
-- or --
<glyph letter="a" name="my_a_glyph" position="10,10"/>
<image src="my_image" position="20,20"/>
or something like that.
Is there any existing file format out there that can handle it? EPUB won't do the fixed-position text, and PDF sucks in too many ways to describe.
I think you can look at FB2 (FictionBook 2) format . That is an XML-based format, designed for publishing books. It includes images, though I am not sure if they can be aligned absolutely.
Also, you can simply go with HTML and do HTML-to-PDF rendering when needed (there exists various components and libraries for this). I don't see (or you have not listed) any reasons why this way doesn't work.
GROFF? Maybe build a macro library to customize it, as needed.
Groff/troff/nroff, the "run off" programs of Unix, can output to postscript or HTML. The jump from postscript to PDF is built in to some PDF viewers; there are also several existing programs for it, pstopdf, for example.
GROFF has some fixed layout options and some flow-like options. With GROFF, it's almost easier to base most of the printout on flowing text, within proscribed bounds.

Best way to generate a custom document?

I am working on generating a document for printing. It should use a specific TTF font and everything must be printed with vector graphics (for quality). Some of the text should be replaced automatically (e.g. current time). Also it should include a custom-generated EPS image with a chart.
Ideally I would like to have some kind of document template where the text could be replaced easily, and it would be nice if it could import the image through path. But I am not sure which format could be good for this. Best I can come to think of is LaTeX, but I don't like that it's a lot of manual work to use it with TTF... any other ideas?
By the way, I am using OS X...
Memoir package is very flexible for your special layouts.
Xetex uses your system fonts (Installed together with TexLive).
You could blend most of those elements to an EPS using imagemagick or gimp script-fu
There are several products out there that will build you a PDF programmatically. I've only used the Coldfusion Report Builder myself and that may not be practical/affordable for your application. If your budget allows I'd look into a commercial reporting product. I know Adobe have several that will generate Flash, FlashPaper or PDF output.