Best ways to convert XPS to PDF (and vice-versa)? - wpf

I have XPS documents being generated from XAML User Controls that act as templates. I want to convert the XPS documents into alternative formats, mainly PDF, programmatically with a .NET based API.
What is the best way to do this?

You can also use ABCpdf PDF Component for .NET . Version 7 can serve your purpose.
see http://www.websupergoo.com/abcpdf-12.htm.
it provides fully functional trial version unlike NiXPS and almost equally as fast as NiXPS.

The way I have done this in the past is print my XPS file to a PDF printer. I use cutePDF for this. So when you select to print, you print to cutePDF which prints a PDF version.
I am not sure if this will meet your needs but it has worked well for me in the past.

If you have OneNote, you can print to OneNote and then export as PDF at least in OneNote 2013. This seems better than having to install another third party tool.

After much searching, I found this SDK:
NiXPS
Its kindof expensive but works wonderfully. Goodbye fop!

If you want to do this in your own program, CloudConvert has a free and open source API built on the .NET framework by MadScripter.
https://github.com/MadScripter/CloudConvert-.NET-Wrapper/

Related

Basic text formatting during text input with Codename One

I know that is possible to programmatically format a text in Codename One using something like "Rich Text View". But in my use case the user can do basic formatting of the text.
For example, see the following two screenshots of the Protonmail app. How can I do something similar with Codename One?
In the first screenshot, "Taglia" means "Cut" and "Copia" means "Copy".
In the second screenshot, "Grassetto" means "Bold" and "Corsivo" means "Italic".
We don't support that. This behavior is very inconsistent between platforms and pretty limited in all native platforms so implementing it in a cross platform way isn't practical.
However, since all platforms have good HTML5 support it's pretty easy to implement it with a WebView by embedding a web based rich edit widget. Since these consistently work with HTML the results are cross platform and should be easy to work with. In the past we had a CKEditor cn1lib but I think it's out of date by now. The core concept should work though and should be much easier to implement as we now support the html package for deploying web resources. So you can take any HTML based text editor and just place the files under the src/html directory then open that hierarchy for editing.

Is it possible to define GUI elements in XML instead of Json in ExtJS

I'm starting out with ExtJS, and I found it hard to write the Json for all the GUI elements, and going back and forth between the IDE and online documentation to figure things out. And I thought, it would have been much easier if there were an alternate XML format with a schema file containing all the documentation. Does ExtJS have such a format? Maybe a third party tool or extension?
I'd recommend taking a look at Ext TLD which is about as close as you'll get without building your own interpreter.

Is there a tool for helping the extraction of localizable text from Xaml?

I am tasked with the localization of a Windows Phone 7 application. The first step is to replace the actual visible text with an ID and put the ID and the text in a resource file.
This is a very tedious work and I was wondering if there are tools for this to automate?
I am thinking along the lines of the gettext package and .po files used in the linux world.
Here is a codeplex project that may help you some. http://xlocalization.codeplex.com/. To use this method, each control that is to be localized must have the name property assigned.
I tried it with my existing project, and got results that were mixed, but in the long run, I decided to do it by hand. I don't remember specifically what the problems were that I had, but if you want to try it on a copy of your project, it won't take much time. If it works for you (and if your controls to be localized all have names), it could save you time.
Also, I don't know how familiar you are with localizing, but I wrote a blog on the subject that takes you from start to finish. It's at http://www.hopnet.mobi, click Blogs.
Hope this helps.
I know this will get a lot of traditional answers, but I would also like to put forward something completely original we tried (and succeeded) doing ourselves for more efficient localisation of Silverlight using Attached Properties instead of binding:
Localisation of Silverlight projects after completion
To pre-populate the database we wrote a XML parser to find our markers in all our project's XAML files (XAML is just a subset of XML after all). We could not find any existing tools to do what you suggested, but our requirements were simplified by our new method of localisation (no resource files and no horrid bindings).
(yes, this is almost the same answer as a previous one of mine today, but it seems to fit again).
Also for future reference keep an eye out for this tool: http://www.neovelop.com/ This tool will go in private beta soon and looks very promising. Judging from their preview movie this will do exactly what you asked for.

View Google Sketchup (.skp) files on the web (Rehash)

Can anyone point me to any libraries or products that will allow me to pass a Google Sketchup SKP file in and as a result view the 3D model on a website in either Silverlight, Flash or HTML Canvas?
I know both Flash & Silverlight now support 3D out of the box, so I'm hoping there has been some updates since answers below were given over a year ago.
Silverlight's still kinda slow as far as web 3d engines are concerned (although I'm expecting great things from it in the next few years).
So in flash there's alot of evolved graphic engines like Papervision3D for example. You use these libraries to load a certain 3d file format, I forgot the name.
Anyway, you then just export your sketchup file into this format, or into another format you could later convert. Although I think you need the FULL version of sketchup to export if I'm not mistaken...
You can use a tool such as 3DPaintBrush to export the Sketchup files to XAML which can then be used in Silverlight projects. Unfortunately 3DPaintBrush isn't free, but it does have a 15 day trial to see if it is worth getting.

PowerPoint and WPF

I really need a way of loading a .ppt document in my wpf application. Can anyone give me a hint, code sample?
Checkout the following discussion thread. Also Dr.WPF got an interesting article that might help you as well: Hosting Office in WPF Application
However consider license costs will be quite high for your scenario...
According to this artice the DSO Framer is no longer supported. Have to look for something else.
You may need to elaborate a bit more on your particular need to get a practical answer.
I don't think hosting PowerPoint (ppt) is a good option because it requires ppt to be installed on the target machine.... and if the target machine has ppt then you can use its API to save the document as HTML and open it in a WebBrowser control.
If the target machine doesn't have powerpoint you may look into some online file conversion service and try hooking up there to convert to HTML and still use WebBrowser control.
I definitely don't recommend wasting your time with DSOFramer - it's very unstable at best and it will just feel like you're one step away from making it work for a while but it doesn't work.
Another option is of course to write your own parser for ppt files, the OfficeOpenXML version of the files is definitely "parseable". I've done that for Word docx and it's relatively easy to get the course data out of the document - say shapes, text... - but the devil there is in the details. There are a zillion little features to implement.

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