[Flashcoders] import documents into flash
Hi! A client asked me to create a application that imports different data documents into flash. Html pages, word documents and pdf's. It's about the text only and the layout doesn't matter. Is flash the right choice for this? Regards, Tom ___ Flashcoders mailing list Flashcoders@chattyfig.figleaf.com http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/listinfo/flashcoders
Re: [Flashcoders] import documents into flash
My gut says that this is not the greatest idea, however, I had to do something like this for a course once and ended up creating what is basically a FlashPaper loader. Here's a link to some code for resolving the issues with loading FlashPaper documents in Flex that'll likely be useful. http://www.darronschall.com/weblog/2006/11/how-to-load-flashpaper-documents-in-flex-2.cfm And, of course, flash paper itself http://www.adobe.com/products/flashpaper/ Not sure how accessible this will be, if that's a concern. Jer ___ Flashcoders mailing list Flashcoders@chattyfig.figleaf.com http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/listinfo/flashcoders
Re: [Flashcoders] import documents into flash
On 15/02/10 15:02, Tom Huynen wrote: Hi! A client asked me to create a application that imports different data documents into flash. Html pages, word documents and pdf's. It's about the text only and the layout doesn't matter. Is flash the right choice for this? Regards, Tom ___ Flashcoders mailing list Flashcoders@chattyfig.figleaf.com http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/listinfo/flashcoders Can you please clarify: It's about the text only and the layout doesn't matter. -- Flash is an excellent choice for this. I am currently developing a full document delivery system for a client. You can approach your task from different perspectives: 1. Use a conversion Web service if the client is happy with that. You can use the scribd API to convert and display the documents. http://www.scribd.com/developers 2. If there are any privacy issues (my case) and your client would rather have the system in house then you need to create the following: 1. A tool that convert the various document formats into pdf 2. Convert the pdf document into a swf file and display it. To get you started, here are a few open source projects that may be of interest: 1. SwfTools: http://www.swftools.org/ pdf2swf will convert your pdf into a swf file - it is a great tool 2. Flex paper for your viewer http://www.devaldi.com/?page_id=260 3. If you need the text in the pdf file, you can use the pdftotext utility that comes with the Xpdf library. I hope this helps. Thanks, Joseph ___ Flashcoders mailing list Flashcoders@chattyfig.figleaf.com http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/listinfo/flashcoders
Re: [Flashcoders] import documents into flash
Tom Huynen wrote: Hi! A client asked me to create a application that imports different data documents into flash. Html pages, word documents and pdf's. It's about the text only and the layout doesn't matter. Is flash the right choice for this? if your are talking about a standalone app (projector), I think the answer is: no parsing word docs and PDF files to extract the text data isn't trivial, in my opinion the best solution is to use existing open source commandline tools for this, like e.g. pdftotext (part of xpdf) and antiword or wvText (part of wv library). since there is no easy way to call commandline tools from flash projectors, I'd recommend to either use a flash wrapper (like zinc or ScreenweaverHX/HaXe) that can do this, or another RAD solution like e.g. director, RuntimeRev or REALbasic. if you are talking about an online app, the frontend doesn't really matter, it could be either flash or plain HTML, the actual parsing would be done on the (*nix) server, again using open source solutions like xpdf or antiword/wvText. cheers, valentin ___ Flashcoders mailing list Flashcoders@chattyfig.figleaf.com http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/listinfo/flashcoders
Re: [Flashcoders] import documents into flash
Html pages, word documents and pdf's. It's about the text only and the layout doesn't matter. Is flash the right choice for this? if your are talking about a standalone app (projector), I think the answer is: no parsing word docs and PDF files to extract the text data isn't trivial, in my opinion the best solution is to use existing open source commandline tools for this, like e.g. pdftotext (part of xpdf) and antiword or wvText (part of wv library). since there is no easy way to call commandline tools from flash projectors, I'd recommend to either use a flash wrapper (like zinc or ScreenweaverHX/HaXe) that can do this, or another RAD solution like e.g. director, RuntimeRev or REALbasic. just to show what a great tool director used to be :-), here a little standalone windows app that can extract the text contents of both PDF and MS Word files (using xpdf and antiword under the hood): http://dasdeck.com/staff/valentin/tmp/textExtract.zip it took me about 10 minutes to write it, and it would maybe take another 5 minutes to add basic HTML support, and another 5 minutes to port it to Mac. cheers, valentin ___ Flashcoders mailing list Flashcoders@chattyfig.figleaf.com http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/listinfo/flashcoders
Re: [Flashcoders] import documents into flash
just to show what a great tool director used to be... Still is! ___ Flashcoders mailing list Flashcoders@chattyfig.figleaf.com http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/listinfo/flashcoders
