I'm working on a feature for a .NET 4 WPF/WCF/EF 4/SQL 2008 application that supports adding/editing Rtf or Excel content. We're using 3rd party components from Telerik and GrapeCity to support Rtf and Excel editing inside our product.
Among other pertinent fields, the "Entry" entity is simple and includes an RtfContent varchar(max), ExcelContent varbinary(max), and IsRtf (bit). IsRtf indicates if the Entry uses Rtf (true) or Excel (false). They are mutually exclusive.
Using the 3rd party controls, I can "export" the Rtf and Excel data as Pdf, Html, or each as Rtf and Xlsx.
We're wanting to include the Rtf or Excel content into a report, and we're using Data Dynamics Reporting package. I'm stumped on how or even if we can accommodate this request since Data Dynamics doesn't offer support for Rtf, Excel, Html, or Pdf. They do however, offer support for Tiff (and some other image formats).
I'm not sure if this would be a trivial conversion, but it may be the only way to include this content in a Data Dynamics Report.
Is it possible to convert any of those formats to a Tiff image? Or would it be possible to somehow "capture" the content of one of the 3rd party controls as a Tiff?
I can't say that I like the thought of performing conversions like this, but I'm running out of ideas.
Any thoughts?
This question addresses converting PDF to different images in C# and would probably work for you.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/711942/convert-pdf-file-to-jpg-asp-net
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My customer gave me some Word and Powerpoint documents which specify how certain 'reports' generated by our product are supposed to look like.
That means, I need to modify those documents (replace placeholders etc.) and then I need to export them as PDF.
How would you solve this problem in C# ?
TL;DR: Editing the office document is no problem at all, but exporting that document to PDF (using Interop) allegedly causes issues when running it as a web server application. That's the whole problem here.
I agree that Interop is not suitable for document manipulation in server environment. I would approach this problem by preparing MS Word template documents with placeholders for data. Then I would use c# to load the data for the reports and merge the data with templates to get final documents (docx, pdf, xps or various image formats). There are 3rd party toolkits which make it quite easy. Here is the code used by one such toolkit needed for merging xml data with the template to get a pdf document:
XElement customers = XElement.Load("Customers.xml");
DocumentGenerator dg = new DocumentGenerator(customers);
DocumentGenerationResult result = dg.GenerateDocument("MyTemplate.docx", "MyReport.pdf");
You can of course also use free libraries and SDKs based on OpenXML but you should expect a steep learning curve, lots of debugging and lots of time invested.
Wkthmltopdf might be an option.
A completely different "report approach" could be, to save those office documents with the placeholders as mht (That's MHTML a web archive format). This could be done directly in MS Office or even programatically.
The placeholders could be easily exchanged by string search and replace. The mht files could directly be used to show the report instead of the PDF. A clear disadvantage of the mht format, is the HTML formatting. With PDF you have a clear and fix positioning.
We are using this kind of report creation. There are some flaws, but it works and the customer could edit the mht templates directly by right-click Open-With the prefered MS Office flavor.
You can use report generators, like FastReport.Net for solving your problems. It can assign different data for placeholders and also allow export to PDF.
Its a general scenario when we provide an option of attaching a file (MS .doc) to end user. This file is stored in DB as binary. When user try to access this attachment next time, we allow them to download it. Now, here I want to give a feature to user where he should be able to open this doc file on click, edit it and save it without downloading.
.doc is a binary format and not easy to work with - a library such as Aspose, as mentioned by Christian, is definitely the way to go.
However, if .DOCX is acceptable (and that's Office 2007 and higher), then you can achieve what you want in three steps:
Convert .docx to HTML
Convert Word to HTML then render HTML on webpage
Display the HTML using any rich text control of your choice
What is the best rich textarea editor for jQuery?
Finally, convert HTML back to .docx:
Convert Html to Docx in c#
You would have to "reinvent" Microsoft Office Online (look into your skydrive account). I am unsure if there are any "out of the box" libraries for that, but you could build a simple editing app by leveraging Aspose word (or some other library). But that would be far from simple.
Link to aspose: http://www.aspose.com/.net/word-component.aspx
Word will only open files that are locally stored. What you are looking for is something similar to editing items that SharePoint provides using the WebDAV interface.
You may be able to use this approach to support your requirement. You should be cautious about the security aspects of the solution unless you have fully authenticated access to the shared folder on the server.
I am not sure if a standalone MS Word Document editor exists. However, this can be done with using a combination of rich text formatting / converting tool (for example, the DevExpress ASPxHtmlEditor + Document Server):
Load binary data from a DB;
Import loaded data (MS Word content) as HTML content into the ASPxHtmlEditor;
Edit imported data via the WYSIWYG ASPxHtmlEditor;
Convert the edited HTML back to MS Word content;
Save the converted / edited MS Word content back to the DB.
I believe, it is possible to do something like this if you have such products (free or commercial analogs) in your project.
I am using SQL Server Reporting Service 2005(SSRS 2005) to export report to Excel and PDF and VS2008. But now i want an option to Export to Word also, but it is not possible in SSRS 2005 report that i came to know after googling. Here problem is that I CAN'T USE SSRS 2008 REPORT. So i thought that i will follow the steps as....
-- Export to Word
1. Export to PDF
2. Convert that PDF to Word document
Even after so much of googling i didn't got the proper answer. I told once and even telling that i can't use any third party tools so don't give me wrong path.
There are many fundamental differences between PDF and Word making the approach you want highly undesirable as a general workflow. I'll give just one example: PDF typically does not store information about document structure - sentences, paragraphs, columns, tables... All it stores is the actual text at certain locations at a page. Word of course does have those concepts.
Is it possible to do what you want? Yes, to some extent. In the general case with guesswork and approximation. If you know which information you want to convert it might be possible to search for it in the PDF file generated by SSRS and then generate a Word file out of it. However, if SSRS allows export to text, XML, RTF or any other structure based file format (however slightly structure based), you'd have a much easier time.
If you insist on doing what you suggest here, you would have to:
1) Write code to take the PDF exported from SSRS and interpret it (find the textual content you want)
2) Recreate the necessary structural information from that information (what are paragraphs, where and what are the tables, what's the formatting etc...)
3) Write that into a file Word can read (or create a new Word document directly using automation).
This would be a considerable amount of work, but you have all of the necessary information as the PDF specification is freely downloadable from the Adobe web site and it contains all of the information you need.
I need to convert PDF files into .doc files using C#. The computer has no file system though it doesn't have Office installed. Any good ideas how I can approach this? I did some research and most of people use the interop services.
You need to understand that PDF is not really implemented as a single document format.
If your PDF docs are created by rendering text to a PDF file, then direct PDF conversion is not only possible, but can be very good (reliable).
If the source of your PDF is either a scanner or fax (essentially a scanner...) then what you have is a document with an "picture" of text. This scenario is more difficult to deal with. If you open up the markup for this there is no 'text' to be converted. In this situation you have to deal with some manner of OCR (optical character recognition) which is less reliable due to a variety of issues.
If you have the option of intercepting the data before it is rendered to PDF (say like in SSRS or Crystal) then it would be better for you to bypass the PDF stage and move your data to a Word document.
If you are constrained to receiving faxes and then needing to interpret their content, prepare for OCR hell. It has been a while since I was there, so I hope that it has gotten better.
Even with out office installed on your machine, you have access (with Visual Studios) to the Office developer toolkit which will allow you build documents to be distributed in the Word formats.(.doc/.docx).
An option/idea may be to convert the PDF to Html, which can be opened in Word?
use aspose pdf kit to conver pdf to text and then text to doc using filestream or aspose doc
I want to read tables which are in a PDF document and I want to store these values in a Database.
What I have found so far through searching the web:
Read text from PDF using abcpdf .net, which is freeware available. But it's not right solution because I want to read the tables.
Convert PDF document into Excel/Word. Tables will come in the target document as it is. Word conversion is possible by using EasyPDF Converter which is third party tool which is much cheaper than the other solution available in other tool which converts PDF into Excel.
But I am looking for any other solution/API classes which can convert PDF into Excel.
There are 2 possible solutions
a) Cometdocs makes a free online conversion from PDF to XLS surprisingly good and send for your email the result file.
b) Cognview is a comertial shareware that converts PDF to XLS. There is OCR and text version. I didn't use personally, but they have good recomendations.
If you are looking to upload your data into a database, converting your PDFs to CSV is probably the safest option. The PDFTables API will allow you to do this with C#, converting as many PDFs at once as necessary. https://pdftables.com/pdf-to-excel-api#csharp
You can try to use Quablo, a PDF table extractor available at this web page (link updated/corrected).