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?
Related
I am trying to make a dynamic PDF generator as an .NET Core API. I want to take an existing PDF, or .docx file, and edit it so it replaces the current name (John Doe) with something that can be replaced like #NAME_PLACEHOLDER.
I then want to transform #NAME_PLACEHOLDER -> John Doe (or whatever is in the KeyValuePair or Dictionary<string, string>).
I am running this on a Docker environment, so I can easily execute commands and I am willing to do that as well.
So far I have tried a few things:
1) pdf2htmlEX
Executes as pdf2htmlEX file.pdf
Does the job pretty well
Can be converted back to PDF using Google Chrome headless or similar
Problem: Only the characters used in the PDF can be used to replace. So if I only use A, B, C as characters, it will make D into Times New Roman (or default font)
2) LibreOffice ODT to PDF
This was pretty nice, because I could simply unzip the .odt file, open content.xml, search and replace, then save it as an .odt file again
Could be converted into PDF rather easily using soffice --convert-to pdf
LibreOffice is quite nice
Problem 1: Microsoft Word -> Save as ODT tends to break the formatting, so we have to use LibreOffice to go and change it back again
Problem 2: We don't want to move away from Microsoft's Office suite
3) HTML to PDF using Chrome Headless
What you see is what you get
By far the best option, if we're all developers aaand have unlimited time
Problem 1: Only our developers can make changes, since our marketing department do not know HTML
Problem 2: Our existing PDFs would have to be rewritten in HTML
As you can see, I have tried a bunch of things. None of them, except Chrome Headless, has lived up to my expectations. What I really like about #3 is what you see is what you get. I can make the whole thing in HTML, press CTRL+P and see what it looks like as a finished PDF, basically.
I am looking for a better solution, though. It can be paid. It can be free. All I need is to change out words/phrases with other words dynamically, which apparently seems like a tough thing to do.
Thanks for specifying what you've already found clearly. It helps a lot providing a succinct answer.
The conversion is always tricky - I'm sure you know Word has trouble displaying/editing some Word documents itself.
I have experience regarding point #2 "LibreOffice ODT to PDF" and can suggest a few things to test:
Don't use Microsoft to do the docx->odt conversion. It's not good as you know. Use LibreOffice itself to do this step. The rest of your process remains the same.
For some documents, Libre Office does doc->odt much better. So, you can instead work with DOC format and get a better result without any other changes.
You won't be able to remove the devs from the process, but you can certainly reduce their role allowing your business/marketing teams to have more direct input simply by:
get the starting point document to the devs to run through the conversion process. The devs can "clean up" the document to make it convert nicely.
make this version of the document the "official" starting point. The business or technical teams can load it, adjust it, and put it back into the process.
if possible, expose a test-platform to the business teams so they can download, adjust, upload and render to PDF. This cycle means they will be able to achieve more and if they're good, do impressive stuff without any dev input.
the above steps simply mean don't expect perfect conversion of arbitrary complex documents. Starting from a (even complex) working baseline is great.
Some of that might show you that your #2 is actually going to get the best overall results.
I hope that helps.
To all whom are concerned:
My boss and I are on GitLab and we have problems trying to differentiate between dynamic PDF files.
Normally, for code files like C# class .cs files, it's easy to double-click and have GitLab highlight the changes made between two different versions.
However, we also create dynamic XFA/PDF files in Adobe LiveCycle and it's difficult to tell what has been changed at times, especially if the commit messages are not too specific or too vague. We know people suggested taking screenshots of the PDF between each version, but you can't diff text changes or format changes on image files.
We tried the program DiffPDF found here:
http://www.qtrac.eu/diffpdf.html
But we found out that it does not work with XFA/dynamic forms.
Does anyone have any suggestions on any possible programs that can diff the actual content on PDFs in GitLab?
Thank you for your time and future advice.
I will agree that it is hard to see what have been changed on a PDF, but if you instead look at the XDP-file you will be able to see what code have been changed.
If that is possible for you.
I've had an ongoing neglected question on Expert's Exchange that I would love to finally have answered. Here's the link:
My Expert's Exchange question
My objective is to return a list of every Access file that the user has open at any one time. The site includes a complete set of code to retrieve all open Excel and Word files as an array of those application objects. I've tried everything I know to solve this problem and am poised to pay Microsoft Tech Support to help me answer this question, if no one on the forums is forthcoming with an answer.
The solutions you link for Excel and Word function by looking for instances of those programs running, and using their known COM interface to find the files they have open.
With Access, other things can open the files as well. For example, a C# program or SQL Server import wizard could also have the files open.
A general solution would be rather tricky. However, if you can be sure that the files have the usual extensions, you could enumerate all files that are open in the system and return a list of those that have an appropriate file extension.
To enumerate all open files in the system, see the EnumerateOpenedFiles() method in this article
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/shell/OpenedFileFinder.aspx?fid=422864&df=90&mpp=25&noise=3&sort=Position&view=Quick&fr=26&select=2277170
Note that you don't need all of the code there, as it presents a shell extension that calls EnumerateOpenedFiles() as part of it's operation. You only need that one method, modified to return only files matching the desired file extensions.
I need some advice on how to go about a particular issue I'm trying to build a work around for, but keep finding myself between a couple of poor options.. The application has a large collection of word doc templates. The application is to on the fly generate one of the templates and fill in the bookmarked values.
I have a few options on how to go about this...
Use the Interop Library: I pretty easily fill in an actual, templated document with the Interop library by going through and grabbing all the bookmarks and filling them in and saving the document again.
Issue: I need to be able to support version of Word from 2003-2010; version becomes a concern here... if I link against the wrong version of the Interop.Word, might it cause compatibility issues for users of older versions? I don't have much to test with here, so I'm not sure...
VBA Macro: I've actually used this method to build excel spreadsheets before; write fields to a csv, read into a new document generated from template via VBA, and ta-da, new document.
Issue: Security settings on end-user PCs are likely to be extremely strict. VBA likely to be disabled.
Is there a better way of going about this that I'm not seeing? Is the Interop version likely to be less of a big deal than I thought? Other than OfficeXML, which is a catastrophe for the documents we're using (I've looked..), is there another good possibility?
Edit: submitted early.. damn browser -_-;
VBA is usually blocked in documents and templates that are opened. But templates in the Word startup directory are allowed. I'm not sure about Word 2007 and 2010, but in Words 97 to 2003 there was a wrdstart directory that could contain templates that were loaded on startup of word. The normal.dot file was in there, and you could add your own to contain scripts, macros toolbars and other stuff.
I think this hasn't changed in essence since then, although I don't do a lot of Word development anymore, so I'm not sure.
[edit]
Yes, it still exists. In Word 2010 you'll find the setting in File -> Options -> Advanced -> File Locations (button). There is a 'Startup' setting, pointing to a directory. Templates in this folder will be loaded on startup and their macro's should be able to be executed.
Check File -> Options -> Trust Center -> Trust Center Settings (button). There, you can specify allowed documents, and trusted location. The wrdstart directory is in there, but you can add your own.
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.