I'm trying to do the following(in this order):
Create a Rich Text Format file
Add company image to the top of page and write the data to the RTF
Print the RTF file as PDF through CutePDF or other printer that are
able to convert my RTF to a PDF and thereby save locally on the users PC - The pdf should be saved at a location without prompting the user
After this is done, the RTF file should be deleted and return a message, that confirms the action is successfully done.
Other stuff:
The website where these actions take place, are not meant to host the outcome(the PDFs) but these are supposed to be saved on the users PC. (is this possible without prompting the user to save it? i imagine the website would write directly to the users PC instead of doing the work on the website and save it and then transfer the file to the PC)
OBS: i do not wish to use any 3th party program/DLL other then the converter like cutePDF :)
My question is quite simple i hope :)
Will this work?
No. You can send the PDF back to the user but the user will either be prompted to download the file or it will open automatically (depending on the user's configuration and the response headers you're sending). Without using some sort of plugin you can't save any files directly to the user's computer.
If it was possible to write a file directly to the user's the world as we know it would have ceased to exist. Cities would lie in ruin as idle youtube commentators roamed the streets in violent gangs yelling "FIRST" and engaging in brutal and pointless gang wars. A generation of youth superbly trained by video games would manage to destroy civilization in a matter of days. Fortunately civilization would eventually be rebuilt by Minecraft players but it would take time.
If that functionality is really vital I would suggest looking at a plugin.
Related
This is more of a general question about whether or not its actually possible to achieve what I want.
The basis is that my app allows the user to fill out various tables of data for a preventative maintenance check sheet. They can also attach images to this sheet which saves to the temporary storage on the IOS app. Once its complete they then press a button which generates a HTML document through a StreamWriter. Through this StreamWriter I have created, the images are also appended through URL references to the images in the temporary folder.
The HTML file (Generated Form) is then presented to the user using a WebView. Once the user has checked all the information, they then press a button which presents a MailViewController.
The HTML file (Generated Form) is then automatically attached and once the email has been entered you press send and everything works as it should.
The problem I am now having is that im not sure if its possible to keep the images in the html document. Once you open the HTML file on the receiving device, the images no longer loads because they no longer exist according to the HTML file.
So basically is it possible to keep the images in the HTML file once opened on the receiving device.
Sorry for the long description but its needed so you get an understanding of what I am actually doing. All the code I have written works as it should but just wanted to know if this is possible or not.
Thanks
Jamie
Use base 64 encoded strings for the images and it should work. Since the images would be passed along with the html
I am new to coding and trying to understand something. I have read that a .EXE can not change itself or change embedded files inside itself. So lets say you make a game and that game has setting that the user can adjust like difficulty or level or whatever. Maybe it is an RPG game and they need to save progress. Where does that information get saved? If you save it to a text file then the user could go into the text file and adjust their level and cheat. Also you would not save a password to a text file because then anyone could open the text file and see the password.
Another problem would be that, if they moved the game to a different computer and did not also move the save file they would not have access to their saved information.
For C# applications, there are several ways to save application data; various practices are dicsussed in this question; the most usual ways are custom data files (Xml, Json, binary formats), the Windows registry, or the cofiguration settings file of the application. The problem that a user could manually edit the saved data is always present and somewhat unrelated; this is a drawback of either possibility. One solution would be to encrypt the saved data or use checksums to detect manipulation.
I'm comfortable generating Word documents using Aspose.Word (which can also save as a PDF) but I've recently been asked to do the same thing using a PDF as the starter template. We recently bought Aspose.Total and whilst Aspose.Pdf looks like it can do some manipulations it doesn't look to be all that flexible/easy (like adding a big line of text and getting it to wrap, and shifting other content down the page if it takes up more space).
What would be the best way of using a PDF as a template for what is basically a bit like a mail merge from a database? Should I turn it into a PDF form and merge it from an XML data source? Is this even viable or would such a form still have a limitation on spacing (so that longer lines/paragraphs of text won't reflow the document where necessary)?
From what I can tell it doesn't look like InDesign can be manipulated in c# even via a COM object (which would be nasty on a web server anyway).
If I recreated the InDesign/PDF as a Word document I'm sure I could work wonders, but you know what these publishing types are like, who think Word documents are the tool of the devil. These PDFs are never going to a professional printer anyway; they're just brochures for a client to download from a web page (based on information in a database) for printing/use at home.
You have indeed many solutions for such a web to print project. Choosing one is a matter of budget, requirements and users count. Placing dynamic contents can be done at the simpliest with PDF forms fillable with xml data.
On the other hand you can work with InDesign Server and output PDF based on InDesign templates. That's generally a good choice when a large amount of users needs to get rich pdf files in parallel. But the costs are heavy.
You can also envision A pitstop server or Callas PDFToolBox Server to place dynamic texts based on variables as supplied by you. The good point here is that you don't need much coding here. Those apps are ready to use.
You can at last consider command line tools. A few of them may have some useful commands such as pdfTk or cPdf to merge texts.
I have an task of converting bunch of formats like .pdf, .doc, .jpg, .xls, .txt, .bmp file types into .png format. I found a print driver that does that.
But how do I connect to that printer driver in .net? This will a server side component. I need to print documents into a folder using this print driver.
I am wondering how that can be done.
Thanks
Based on your updated comments, it sounds as if you are looking to convert a variety of images and document types to a single common image type. The process of taking one of the several possible source formats you mention and convert it to a bitmapped format such as .PNG is referred to as RENDERING or RASTERIZING. You want to take one of the input formats, render it to a bitmap representation, then write it to a file in .PNG format. While it certainly might be possible to do this using a print driver, to do so, you would typically be relying on an installed application that would allow you to pass the source document to it for printing to the driver. For this to work, each of the source file types you want to be able to handle this way needs to have an application installed which can take actions from the shell and do what you request. So for example if you want to do this with a .DOC file, you need Microsoft Word installed as it does properly respond to the PRINT shell command. However, the limitation with the shell based method is that it is always going to print to the DEFAULT system printer. So your driver would need to be setup as the default printer for the machine you are going to run your process on. Therefore you would need to see if each of the source types you want to be able to handle have an installed or installable application which will allow you to print them using the shell and the PRINT action verb.
Reference URLs:
Windows Shell Verbs and File Associations
Creating Shortcut Menu Handlers
The problem with this technique is not all applications respond to the PRINT verb correctly or at all. This usually works with all the major Microsoft applications, but you should test any other document types you want to support before going much further with this technique.
This also raises other questions that this doesn't even begin to address such as what to do about multiple page formats. You listed a few image types that are straight-forward and can be converted to PNG files pretty directly. But how do you want to render a multiple page Word document files into PNG format? Do you intend for only one very large PNG with all the pages one after another? Or do you intend for one PNG file per corresponding source document page? The print driver method might not give you very much control over that.
Depending on some of these details and just how much control and reliability you need in the process, you might want to consider a completely different route to your process. Maybe you should consider using tools/libraries that can read the source file formats you want to support and render them directly, after which you can save into your PNG files. One library I have used in the past that would seem to fit and allow you a high degree of control over the conversion (rendering/rasterization) process is LeadTools. It is a fairly pricey product, but my experience with it has been that it does support a wide variety of formats reliably.
LeadTools PDF and Document Readers SDK
There may be some other open source tools available that you could pull together to support this type of functionality, but I'm not familiar with any to point you to anything specific. But hopefully this helps give you some information to look at putting together a process that might be more reliable and give you greater control than trying to coerce a printer driver to do something you might not quite be able to make work reliably.
Server-side component implies something that doesn't have a human sitting at it (at least, not the human that is trying to use that printer). If this is the case then a print driver will not work - Print drivers that write their output to disk instead of a device always, in my experience, ask the user to select a place to save the file (present a Save As dialog).
To elaborate a little bit on what Boo mentioned :
Depending on the printer driver you are using, you may be able to tell it where to save your file.
The problem is by using a printer, how it normally works is that you can print from any application to a .png file. But the application itself has to know how to open and render (not talk to the printer) the content of the original file.
To continue down this path, you have to make sure your server component knows how to read and render content of each file type (.jpg, .pdf, .doc, etc.).
Assuming your server component knows how to render the content, the next step from here is to use the .NET Printing namespace to print your content to the .png printer.
For more details go to : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc188767.aspx
On the server that my application is being run on, a virtual PDF printer is being installed (don't know much about this yet, except it's from Adobe), and my application needs to use this 'printer' to create PDF's from HTML pages (a GridView mostly), and then redirect the user to the URL of the where the PDF is stored.
I've been looking at the PrintDocument object in System.Drawing.Printing, however I've read that you can't simply feed this a HTML page. What are my choices? The easiest option would be to be able to 'print' a given HTML page (choosing what and what not to print using CSS), but from what I've read this is fairly difficult, so I'm thinking about somehow constructing whatever object PrintDocument needs programatically, if that makes sense.
Any ideas on how I should do this?
there are some free/cheap libs for creating pdfs on the fly. I've used itextsharp before and it worked pretty well. Takes a bit of time to get up to speed in how it works but I'd suggest checking it out.
There are also printing services like Neevia DocConverter that will monitor a folder and auto convert whatever you put in the folder to a pdf, jpg, etc. you can set it up so that if you drop a url shortcut in the folder it will render the webpage at that url to pdf. it's a bit more of a pain if you want to do realtime rendering but works excellent for generating mass reports in batches that you want to post up to a website or email later.