I am looking for a way to convert HTML text to RTF string. Is there any libraries that does this job. I get html content dynamically in my project and need it to be rendered in RTF format. I am using HTML parser to convert HTML text to normal string and then have trying to use PyRTF for conversion to RTF format. Is there any better way that this can be done.Thanks in advance.
RTF seems a dicey format to convert from/to. I've tried cutting and pasting among applications on Mac OS X, for example, where RTF is something of a lingua franca. Some of those apps are Microsoft apps (relevant in that RTF is a Microsoft-developed format), others are not. Even basic formatting information like font size, font face, line spacing, and list styling (ordered or unordered) is jumbled when copying from one ostensibly RTF-speaking app to another. Simply put, it's a mess.
I have searched for ways to programmatically read, write, and transform RTF, preferably from Python. I found a number of packages on PyPI, trying them out has been a disappointing experience. They would support RTF 1.5, say, when the current version is 1.9.1. RTF has been around a long time, but a 2005-vintage spec is not very recent. There were lots of gotchas and incompatibilities. LOTS.
Now, I'm not saying it's impossible, or that there aren't other libraries out there that would do the trick. I have not tried the zopyx.convert mentioned by others here, for example. Maybe it's great. But looking at its dependencies--Java, FOP, etc.--it looks like a pretty complex (and thus likely fragile) toolchain. I read its code on github, and the Python is really only there as a coordination veneer. It organizes external tools XFC, XINC, FOP, and PrinceXML--three of the four of which are commercial software. That includes the key XFC part that deals with RTF. Color me skeptical.
There are two converters that I've found are worth a look: If you're using a Mac, the textutil command line program is actually one of the better and simpler tools I've seen.
textutil -convert html filename.rtf -output filename.html
The other formatting engine that's worth considering is LibreOffice. It's free, open source, reasonably amenable to automation, and a decent foundation as an interoperability hub. That's not just a guess; I've built complex, multi-format document workflows around it.
I would question why you're trying to get into RTF. That seems like a document format you'd be trying to escape from. But if you need to go there, textutil and LibreOffice are the least-worst mechanisms I've found.
There is a wonderful python library that comes as a tarball.
You can download it at https://pypi.python.org/pypi/zopyx.convert2/2.4.5.
Good luck!
I see this question is over a year old, but figured I'd contribute anyway. I recently had a similar requirement, and turned to PyRTF, a small but powerful Python module that can construct RTF documents from a text file. You could use Beautiful Soup to scrape the HTML, going down the parse tree tag by tag, and use the PyRTF API to construct appropriate objects (table, cell, paragraph, section or document).
The API itself is quite granular, and allows for a whole bunch of custom formatting (font text, alignment, color, headers, footers etc.)
Hope this helps.
Related
Hello I am struggling to convert hundreds of fb2 files to txt using Python. I find pyandoc and EbookLib but I didn't find in their functionality this option, or I didn't search carefully.
Can someone suggest me something relevant in my case ? Maybe free API, but I think there could be a library.
something relevant in my case
I did look for fb2 and FictionBook2 at PyPI and found 2 potentially useful to you: catpandoc and FB2. 1st does Cat multiple documents to the terminal. and support numerous file formats. 2nd is Python package for working with FictionBook2. For FB2 example is given how to create FB2 file, but not how to read. I do not know if it means documentation is poor or it does not have read support at all.
EDIT: After some research I found that FictionBook2 files are XML files. Example can be seen here. That being said I encourage you to first try existing FB2 tools and only if they fail to deliver desired result implement extraction by XML parsing.
I'm looking to generate PDF's from a Python application.
They start relatively simple but some may become more complex (Essentially letter like documents but will include watermarks for example later)
I've worked in raw postscript before and providing I can generate the correct headers etc and file at the end of it I want to avoid use of complex libs that may not do entirely what I want. Some seem to have got bitrot and no longer supported (pypdf and pypdf2) Especially when I know PDF/Postscript can do exactly what I need. PDF content really isn't that complex.
I can generate EPS (Encapsulated postscript) fine by just writing the appropriate text headers to file and my postscript code. But Inspecting PDF's there is a lil binary header I'm not sure how to generate.
I could generate an EPS and convert it. I'm not overly happy with this as the production environment is a Windows 2008 server (Dev is Ubuntu 12.04) and making something and converting it seems very silly.
Has anyone done this before?
Am I being pedantic by not wanting to use a library?
borrowed from ask.yahoo
A PDF file starts with "%PDF-1.1" if it is a version 1.1 type of PDF file. You can read PDF files ok when they don't have binary data objects stored in them, and you could even make one using Notepad if you didn't need to store a binary object like a Paint bitmap in it.
But after seeing the "%PDF-1.1" you ignore what's after that (Adobe Reader does, too) and go straight to the end of the file to where there is a line that says "%%EOF". That's always the last thing in the file; and if that's there you know that just a few characters before that place in the file there's the word "startxref" followed by a number. This number tells a reader program where to look in the file to find the start of the list of items describing the structure of the file. These items in the list can be page objects, dictionary objects, or stream objects (like the binary data of a bitmap), and each one has "obj" and "endobj" marking out where its description starts and ends.
For fairly simple PDF files, you might be able to type the text in just like you did with Notepad to make a working PDF file that Adobe Reader and other PDF viewer programs could read and display correctly.
Doing something like this is a challenge, even for a simple file, and you'd really have to know what you're doing to get any binary data into the file where it's supposed to go; but for character data, you'd just be able to type it in. And all of the commands used in the PDF are in the form of strings that you could type in. The hardest part is calculating those numbers that give the file offsets for items in the file (such as the number following "startxref").
If the way the file format is laid out intrigues you, go ahead and read the PDF manual, which tells the whole story.
http://www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/devnet/acrobat/pdfs/PDF32000_2008.pdf
but really you should probably just use a library
Thanks to #LukasGraf for providing this link http://www.gnupdf.org/Introduction_to_PDF that shows how to create a simple hello world pdf from scratch
As long as you're working in Python 2.7, Reportlab seems to be the best solution out there at the moment. It's quite full-featured, and can be a little complex to work with, depending on exactly what you're doing with it, but since you seem to be familiar with PDF internals in general hopefully the learning curve won't be too steep.
I recommend you to use a library. I spent a lot of time creating pdfme and learned a lot of things along the way, but it's not something you would do for a single project. If you want to use my library check the docs here.
We have a project in python with django.
We need to generate complex word, excel and pdf files.
For the rest of our projects which were done in PHP we used PHPexcel ,
PHPWord and tcpdf for PDF.
What libraries for python would you recommend for creating this kind of files ? (for excel and word its imortant to use the open xml file format xlsx , docx)
Python-docx may help ( https://github.com/mikemaccana/python-docx ).
Python doesn't have highly-developed tools to manipulate word documents. I've found the java library xdocreport ( https://code.google.com/p/xdocreport/ ) to be the best by far for Word reporting. Because I need to generate PCL, which is efficiently done via FOP I also use docx4j.
To integrate this with my python, I use the spark framework to wrap it up with a simple web service, and use requests on the python side to talk to the service.
For excel, there's openpyxl, which actually is a python port of PHPexcel, afaik. I haven't used it yet, but it sounds ok to me.
I would recommend using Docutils. It takes reStructuredText files and converts them to a range of output files. Included in the package are HTML, LaTeX and .odf file writers but in the sandbox there are a whole load of other writers for writing to other formats, see for example, the WordML writer (disclaimer: I haven't used it).
The advantage of this solution is that you can write plain text (reStructuredText) master files, which are human readable as is, and then convert to a range of other file formats as required.
Whilst not a Python solution, you should also look at Pandoc a Haskell library which supports a much wider range of output and input formats than docutils. One major advantage of Pandoc over Docutils is that you can do the reverse translation, i.e. WordML to reStructuredText. You can try Pandoc here.
I have never used any libraries for this, but you can change the extension of any docx, xlsx file to zip, and see the magic!
Generating openxml files is as simple as generating couple of XML files (you can use templates) and zipping it.
Simplest way to generate PDF is to generate HTML (with CSS+images) and convert it using wkhtmltopdf tool.
I'm working on a project that is going to extract specified text from a pdf document. I have no experience with this type of extraction. One issue is that we don't just want a dump of all the text in the document. Rather, is there a way to extract only certain fields in the pdf? Is there a notion of pdf templates that could be used for something like this?
I'm trying to use Apple's Automator - this is able to get all the text but not specified text. Ideally, I would like someone in Pages to have for example 30 discreet rows of text and have 20 of those rows be specified as 'catalog item' and have our Automator script take ONLY those twenty lines.
Any ideas on best workflow / extraction tools for this? I would prefer only consumer level items be used such as Apple Pages, Automator, and ruby or python as a scripting language.
thx
edit #1
looks like tagged pdf's might be one way to do this - not sure how well supported on Apple Pages this is
With python, the best choice would probably be PDFMiner. It can extract the coordinates for every text string, so you can work out the rectangles in your form on your own and pick out what falls within them. It's all pretty low level, but PDF is unfortunately a pretty low level format.
Be warned that unless you already know a lot about the structure of PDF, you'll find the API and documentation rather scanty. Look around for usage examples, including here on SO.
For Ruby you might try pdf-reader for parsing a PDF and accessing both metadata and content. Extracting the specific items your interested in is another story, but how to go about doing that depends highly on what format of data you're expecting.
You can use Origami in Ruby, a framework designed to parse, analyze,
and forge PDF documents, or the Python equivalent: Origapy, a simple Python
interface for the Ruby based Origami.
I am using reportlab toolkit in Python to generate some reports in PDF format. I want to use some predefined parts of documents already published in PDF format to be included in generated PDF file. Is it possible (and how) to accomplish this in reportlab or in python library?
I know I can use some other tools like PDF Toolkit (pdftk) but I am looking for Python-based solution.
I'm currently using PyPDF to read, write, and combine existing PDF's and ReportLab to generate new content. Using the two package seemed to work better than any single package I was able to find.
If you want to place existing PDF pages in your Reportlab documents I recommend pdfrw. Unlike PageCatcher it is free.
I've used it for several projects where I need to add barcodes etc to existing documents and it works very well. There are a couple of examples on the project page of how to use it with Reportlab.
A couple of things to note though:
If the source PDF contains errors (due to the originating program following the PDF spec imperfectly for example), pdfrw may fail even though something like Adobe Reader has no apparent problems reading the PDF. pdfrw is currently not very fault tolerant.
Also, pdfrw works by being completely agnostic to the actual content of the PDF page you are placing. So for example, you wouldn't be able to use pdfrw inspect a page to see if it contains a certain string of text in the lower right-hand corner. However if you don't need to do anything like that you should be fine.
There is an add-on for ReportLab — PageCatcher.