We trying to set up automated regression testing our generated PDFs by converting our them to images and then using Python Imaging library to test the difference, pixel by pixel, between new and old versions. Right now, the only step that isn't automated is converting the PDFs to images. I know there are ways to convert PDFs to images with other rendering engines (e.g. postscript), but since we're doing precise pixel by pixel comparisons we want to make sure that we are using Adobe's PDF renderer to generate the image. Is there a way to do this with Adobe's renderer?
Have a look at GhostScript - http://www.ghostscript.com/
Also have a look at the PDF tools from tall components - http://www.tallcomponents.com/
You can use Acrobat programatically, however this may be against their licensing and as far as I remember it was much slower than GhostScript.
Related
Does anyone know if there is a function in PDF's to allow them to auto-adjust the view depending on whether it is on a desktop or mobile? Or even by screen size?
I am looking to prepare PDF material for distribution, however, on the user group includes a mix of desktop and mobile, so instead of creating two PDFs I would like to have a single PDF which adapts to the users screen?
This is not possible with PDF files up to PDF version 1.7, the most commonly used on out there.
PDF 2.0 which was released three years ago has such a feature but it depends on the viewer implementing it and the PDF writer correctly annotating the PDF. I guess there are PDF viewers out there that can already do this but I'm not specifically aware of any.
If I were you, I would write the document in a format like LaTeX that can easily be converted to both kinds of PDFs, one for desktop and one for mobile.
I am trying to convert djvu documents to pdf documents. The documents are books and they need to be batch converted.
All djvu to pdf converters I have used, including the ddjvu utility, a-pdf-2-djvu, online converters and other converters have the problem that text quality is significantly diminished when converting to pdf.
You can notice the same thing when converting djvu to tif.
The Zebradoc djvu converter claims to fix that problem:
DjVu Converter can reformat raster e-books (e.g. DJVU or PDF) for devices with small screens such as PDA, phones etc. Tool automatically recognizes text and image zones, scales and reflows text and scales images to best fit target screen size.
References
Zebradoc djvu Converter
Java DJVU to PDF eBook converter
JavaDjvu
if you can live with an online converter the best one is probably the following: https://www.djvu-pdf.com/ since it also supports the conversion of OCR layers.
This is not strictly a programming question, but it's related to programming task I need to perform this in order to make an iPhone app.
I have a PDF file with a large image (say, a campus map) which I want to store as a PNG image to include as resource in the app. The image I want itself is much larger than the screen area (a lot larger, about 4000x4000 px). So I cannot just take a single screenshot of the PDF and save it as PNG. The only way I know to accomplish this is to take a number of screenshots of different parts of the image and manually stitch them together in an image editor. There will be 8-10 images to stitch together, if not more.
I wonder if anyone knows a more efficient way of doing this? Acrobat PDF reader does not allow this. Are there any tools or tricks in either Windows or MacOS I can use? Googling this did not bring anything that works.
It would also be an option to use the PDF directly, iOS has pretty good support for reading PDFs, see the ZoomingPDFViewer sample code from Apple for an example.
As for your actual question, I'm not sure if there are existing tools that do exactly what you want here (though I'd guess there are), but it would also be pretty easy to make a small Cocoa command-line tool that converts a PDF to a number of bitmap tiles using Core Graphics.
You could use Ghostscript to convert your pdf to a png.
A command like
gs -sDEVICE=png16m -r600 -o my_Map.png my_Map.pdf
would provide you a png from a pdf image.
I'm creating a Custom Google Map based on an image in an Adobe Illustrator file. I need to cut the file into 256px x 256px PNGs to feed into the Google Maps API.
You can write scripts to automate tasks in Illustrator using ExtendScript, a modified version of JavaScript. I found one example of a script for Photoshop that makes tiles for Google Maps (Hack #68 in this book) but I haven't figured out how to port this over to Illustrator.
The main problem is I can't figure out how to tell Illustrator to isolate 256px x 256px portions of an image. The Photoshop script does this by selecting portions of the image of that size and copying them into a new file, but as far as I know you can't do that in Illustrator.
Any ideas?
I've got no experience writing scripts for Adobe products, but since Illustrator handles vector data, the tiling algorithm is slightly different. There is a Python script for MS VisualEarth that tiles a set of GPS points (demo), maybe you can take some ideas from it.
Another choice may be to (programatically?) render .AI files to .PNG or something similar an then tile it into 256x256px tiles using that PS hack you referenced.
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.