I'm looking to add ebook support (.pdf .txt .epub .mobi .rtf Support) to a game I'm making in Unity using C#. Thing is I really do not know where to start when it comes to this and most of my google searches have gotten me nothing but Ebooks about programming or game development. So I'm hoping someone here would have a good idea where I could start and/or information that would help set me in the right direction.
So just to summarize my comments on the OP:
With the least amount of work, embedding a web browser control like Webkit is probably the best option. It should properly read all the common filetypes you mentioned, save for .epub and .mobi. A separate library or control will need to be obtained or coded for those to work. Additionally, if the user already has a default program set up to open those filetypes, you can open them outside of the game with Process.Start(...) which is part of the System.Diagnostics namespace.
If it comes down to you having to code this yourself, a PDF is just drawn graphics on a canvas, txt is just raw text data, and an rtf is text data with some markup to get the formatting right. Coding a component that opens those for you should not be abnormally difficult.
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Background
I am working on a WPF windows application and I want add embedded PDF viewer with only basic functionalities including PDF view, text search and page navigation.
I tried embedded Internet Explorer and Adobe PDF Reader installed method (this way ) but this method is not suitable for our requirement as Adobe PDF Reader has too may external links which can not be allowed because of the security reasons of the application.
Therefore, I am trying to use moonpdf library. This library works fine with our requirements but the only problem is there is no text search functionality in this library. (I think it shows PDF as images)
Then, I have download moonpdf source code and realized that moonpdf is using libmupdf.dll wrapping to c#.
I can modify the moonpdf source code and mupdf source code for our requirement if needed.
My Question
Is there any text search functionalities in mupdf? if so how can I use it?
In the basic mupdf library, there are several functions for searching for text. These work by searching a page for a text string, in a few different variants, and returns the area for all hits of the given text. You need to iterate over the pages yourself (in order to do forward or reverse search).
fz_quad hits[1000];
count = fz_search_page(ctx, page, needle, hits, nelem(hits));
That said, I do not know how or even if "moonpdf" has wrapped these functions.
You can certainly extract the text from a document, the MuPDF library will do that. I believe it's up to you to apply your own search criteria after that. I'm afraid I'm not expert enough to answer the 'how to' part of it though. I imagine one of the mutool examples would be helpful here though. I'll see if I can get one of the developers to answer.
I have already seen solution for hiding text files or messages within Image or audio files..
but i want solution for hiding text file within another text files (.txt, .doc, .pdf).
can somebody help for this??
Steganography is based on slightly changing data to "hide" some other set of data within these changes. That's why an image with steganography is slightly different than the original. You can't notice if if you don't know it's there, but the fact is you saved the data as changes within color information of pixels.
.txt file is nothing else than a big hunk of characters. If you tried to somehow change the data to hide something in it, it would result in unreadable text. If you change the color of a pixel from 215 Red to 217 Red, you won't really notice. But changing A to F or Ł is quite noticable.
So no, I don't believe it can be done. At least not with .txt files.
While I agree with #stonehead that at the end of the day if you put something in the file someone can find it, but there are a few tricks out their that may prove to be viable options.
Since most users are not living in their command prompt the most straight forward approach is to misrepresent the file to the GUI. This is a pretty handy trick for this.
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/stupid-geek-tricks-hide-data-in-a-secret-text-file-compartment/
If you are storing data in a pdf you should have very little problems. I would use PdfClown. Not to get too into it but you will want to read up about the structure of a pdf. With clown pdf you could store an asset inside with no connection to the presentation layer. Given the complexity of pdf files i will almost bet no one will be looking in, i would base64encode the chunk to have it blend in with images and other data it would be difficult for someone to find it by just opening up the file.
Be For Warned ClownPDF C# library is not for the faint of heart and it will help to have some java experience because a lot of their docs are for java.
Hope these options help.
I'm trying to do a semi-automated graph layout program. After reading the input, the program should generate a graph (with a specified layout). The tricky part is that the user should be able to choose a subset of the nodes and rearrange those with another algorithm (while saving the rest in their original position). I've went through graphviz and while this option is possible it is very limited (using "pin" only with the 'neato' and 'fdp' algorithms... i would prefer my graph to be oriented)
another requirement would be the price.. I've seen that yworks can do what i need but its paid for...
at this point I'll take any language I can get thanx
currently I'm trying out graphsharp but the documentation is very poor
For python see answers to this question
For java see ansers to this question
If you're happy with semi-automated graph layout, then what you might do is the following (which I did in the past):
download yEd (also from yworks)
save a graph and look at the file: its XML, and the format is not too complex
write some code that save your graph into an XML file compatible with yEd
open your file form yEd, and use built-in layout algorithms
save again your file from yEd
I hope this helps.
I am planning to write an app that can open and display PDF documents, and perform OCR on vector graphic elements within the PDFs. The user must be able to select regions of the document and I need to draw real-time annotations on the document. I don't need to alter or save the document itself.
I have plenty of experience with C# and WPF; I have written a similar application already that does the above on XPS/XAML documents rather than PDF. However that app only runs on Windows and PDF documents must be converted to XPS first.
I have done quite a bit of research and there are many, many options available, none of which seem an obvious choice. There are many libraries that can open PDFs or create PDFs, but most don't seem to give you access to individual vector graphic elements in a format that lets you draw/manipulate them on the screen (similar to what I could do with WPF graphic elements extracted from XPS documents).
I am familiar with .Net and C# (including .Net 2 GDI+ graphics) and I am very keen to stick to what I know. I am also using EmguCV for image recognition which can be compiled in Mono or .Net. As such I am looking at Silverlight (running standalone) or Mono options, both of which should run on PC and Mac.
Performance (for both graphics and number crunching) is a strong consideration, though I am just as interested in getting this up and running quickly.
Does anyone have any experience with opening PDFs, extracting vector graphic elements (perhaps as SVG) and rendering them in a Mono app? Can individual elements be rendered to bitmap?
Alternatively, does anyone have experience with opening PDFs in Silverlight and converting them to XPS or XAML at runtime? I know that WPF and Silverlight graphics libraries are not 1:1, but I'm not sure how this affects XPS contents (generally composed of Canvas, Glyphs and StreamGeometry objects).
Thank you for any advice, tips or links you have to share.
look at this
http://silverpdf.codeplex.com/
it's client side pdf reading library. actually right now it can only read files, but you could play with it and make your own "display" functionality.
You might want to examine the internals of your PDFs so you understand what they actually contain better - you might be very surprised! For example, text can often be scanned pages or images and vecotr graphics do not exist as neat little packages. We wrote a whole load of general articles about what is inside a PDF and analysis tools at http://www.jpedal.org/PDFblog which are not specific to any tool or language.
I am currently working on a project and my goal is to locate text in an image. OCR'ing the text is not my intention as of yet. I want to basically obtain the bounds of text within an image. I am using the AForge.Net imaging component for manipulation. Any assistance in some sense or another?
Update 2/5/09:
I've since went along another route in my project. However I did attempt to obtain text using MODI (Microsoft Office Document Imaging). It allows you to OCR an image and pull text from it with some ease.
This is an active area of research. There are literally oodles of academic papers on the subject. It's going to be difficult to give you assistance especially w/o more deatails. Are you looking for specific types of text? Fonts? English-only? Are you familiar with the academic literature?
"Text detection" is a standard problem in any OCR (optical character recognition) system and consequently there are lots of bits of code on the interwebs that deal with it.
I could start listing piles of links from google but I suggest you just do a search for "text detection" and start reading :). There is ample example code available as well.
recognizing text inside an image is indeed a hot topic for researchers in that field, but only begun to grow out of control when captcha's became the "norm" in terms of defense against spam bots. Why use captcha's as protection? well because it is/was very hard to locate (and read) text inside an image!
The reason why I mention captcha's is because the most advancement* is made within that tiny area, and I think that your solution could be best found there.
especially because captcha's are indeed about locating text (or something that resembles text) inside a cluttered image and afterwards trying to read the letters correctly.
so if you can find yourself a good open source captcha breaking tool you probably have all you need to continue your quest...
You could probably even throw away the most dificult code that handles the character recognition itself, because those OCR's are used to read distorted text, something you don't have to do.
*: advancement in terms of visible, usable, and practical information for a "non-researcher"
If you're ok with using an online API for this, the API at http://www.wisetrend.com/wisetrend_ocr_cloud.shtml can do text detection in addition to just OCR.
Stroke width transform can do that for you. That's at least what MS developed for their mobile phone OS. A discussion on the implementation is here at https://stackoverflow.com/