I have a trouble on merging multiple word documents into single. I had a scenario where I am generating word documents from html with header and footer. I have around 10-15 such documents. I am generating these word document individually and are working fine.
Now, I have a requirement to generate html of all 10 pages and combine them to single word report. These should preserve the individuals report's formatting, header and footer.
I have tried this in two ways but didn't get success:
Combined html of all pages into one html page and then finally saved file as word file.
Created word report for all 10 html files individually and merged them using Microsoft.Office.Interop.
I was able to merge the document but was not able to keep the header, footer and formatting of the individual document.
I have searched about section-break too but not sure how to use this.
Please see if anyone can guide me toward the possible solution or anything else that can help me.
Thanks in advance.
.
You could try merging with DocumentBuilder
If that doesn't give you enough control, see whether docx4j.NET (commercial edition) might help, with its demo merge webapp. Docx4j's MergeDocx provides fine grained control over header/footer behaviour.
I have an word document template that only changes in several fields.
I remember looking around using google-fu and found that you can bind an xml to content controls and dynamically generate word documents through that method.
Unfortunately it's been a while since I revisited this particular problem, and all I remember about this problem was that it was unnessarily clunky and hard to manage.
Are there any opensource solutions that are more elegant? Or a better way to go at this?
I think it is fair to describe content control XML data binding as the latest in a series of techniques which enable Word document generation/automation.
Content control data binding was introduced in Word 2007, so is now not all that new. When you do document automation, you generally also want support for:
conditional inclusion/exclusion of content
repeating data (eg table rows, list items)
There are ways to do both of the above with content controls, and Microsoft has recently released dedicated support for repeating data.
Content control data binding is less brittle than older approaches, but if you don't like XML and XPath, you might not call it elegant :-)
The legacy approaches "baked-in" to Word include:
fields: MERGEFIELD, form fields, or custom fields
use of bookmarks
A problem with these is that it is easy for the author user to mistakenly delete them. Another problem is that they aren't as easy for a developer to work with at the XML level (though maybe OK via VBA or VSTO).
The other approach is to include magic text strings on the document surface, and there are various tools around which do this. This has an initial appeal, but the problem with this is that what looks like a contiguous text string on the document surface can be split up at the XML level, because of:
spelling/grammar correction
rsid (edits made at different times or by different people)
formatting (eg font size, appearance changes)
In short, yeah, there are alternatives. Choose your poison.
I am thoroughly confused with something I want to do and am looking for some advice.
One of my client has to produce monthly invoice detailing all of the company expenditure, and two other such invoices. The client is sure that he only needs these invoices - and they are extremely simple enough to produce as far as logic is concerned.
Now, to make the actual invoice, I don't really want to use reporting solutions like Telerik, SSRS etc.. as I think they are an overkill for my purpose. At the same time, I am not sure how I can get the printer to print the invoices in a neat pages without cutting off anything.
I am very tempted to just give the output in a webpage and ask my client to print them off from there.
Am I not looking at this the right way? Is this possible?
I could use ITextSharp or something to produce pdf's.. In fact, I think I will go ahead with this if it isn't possible to just output to html page and get the printer to recognize the page breaks somehow.
Because this is a very small job, I don't want to spend too much time on it as the cost of this freelance project is minimal too.
The reason printing to a new page is important is that my client has a few shops he deals with and he would want to print each of his customers their own invoices. I can get him to produce each customer's invoice separately and print them but it is not ideal way to deal with it.
thanks
There is a css property which should tell a browser to break a page: page-break-before.
But if you have a a wide list of browsers to support, it would be better to get some HTML to PDF conversion library or really use iTextSharp (as far as I know there is even a module/class which allows to conver HTML to PDF with iTextSharp) as printing web pages has many issues.
In the past, when I wanted to create a reusable document, I used Word or Excel XML formats.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_XML_formats
They are easy to create and tweak, then all you have to do is recreate the dynamic parts in your code. All you have to do is save the document in Office XML format, then open it up in word pad to see where to make your changes.
SSRS has a drag and drop interface for designing reports and has a PDF output option. If the data is in a SQL server database then even with the learning curve it should be easier to do SSRS reports.
I would like to know how can I edit an existing PDF document in C#. The document is already created and has fields as the one on the image below:
I want to know if there is a code which can check the desired checkbox or enter text at the lines. Please let me know.
I looked at iTextSharp but I don't know if that tool can help me achieve that.
There are ways to do it, but it requires external tools. I use ActivePDF library, it provides form filling routines and works quite well..
You can do that with iTextSharp, BUT first you should find out more about the document.
If the pdf contains an actual acroform form definition, filling it is fairly easy. There are many examples in the documentation and on the iText Web site.
If it does not contain such a form definition, though, and the check boxes and text fields merely are some lines drawn somewhere, it gets a bit more difficult: you have to measure where to put your entries.
Additionally you should find out whether the document is signed or encrypted which might limit what you are allowed to do with the document.
I was searching the web with a few results, but none of them seems to fit the task. I was looking für possibilites for .NET, but would also like to know how Java/PHP/etc. developers finish tasks like this.
As far as I found out, I have the option to:
Use MigraDoc/PDFSharp and go the "code" way, without any visual designer
I could use HTML and convert it to a PDF (which is the best approach in theory, but practically it's awful to get good looking HTML 1:1 into a PDF file)
I could use some weird MS Word templateing/batch stuff
LaTeX?
What are your solutions?
We use SoftArtisans OfficeWriter
A solution that we settled on in a previous project was XSL-FO. Although it did not have a visual designer, we found it to be very developer friendly and more suitable to run in a server type environment. It also deals with document "flow" a lot better than most of the reporting software that offer a designer. I do know that we had a lot of trouble with Crystal Reports around deployment, COM exceptions being thrown and limitations on how many reports can be generated concurrently. One downside to using XSL-FO is all the syntactic sugar that comes with XML.
This question lists a few XSL-FO engines.
Regarding your "3.) weird MS Word templateing/batch stuff":
I love to use Aspose.Words, a commercial package to create/edit/export Microsoft Office Word documents, without any Office components being installed.
Aspose.Words is capable of doing Mail Merge stuff and write PDF files, so I often start on my desktop computer with a DOC that I edit in Word and use this with Aspose.Words on my server to produce PDFs.
One method I've used before for Windows desktop applications is to use XAML/WPF. The nice thing about this solution is that there are a lot of good tools and documentation around building layouts with XAML. Then you just pass the canvas to a PrintDialog and you're done. If you've been doing a lot with WPF/XAML already this is a very easy solution and I've had a lot of success with it. I learned most of what I needed to get started here: http://www.switchonthecode.com/tutorials/printing-in-wpf
The downside, of course, is your dependency then on .NET and WPF.
Similar to Matt Fs solution of using Crystal Reports, I use SQL Server Reporting Services. You can create add a rdlc file to your solution and use the WYSIWYG editor to design your report. Then in your code, all you have to do it assign your data source to your report in code and it should work. This even supports exporting to PDF.
Seems as no-one has mentioned Latex-based solutions, there was a stack overflow Tex question answered by jason. Short version: uses MikTex, beautiful documents, big hassle to use build/maintain.
Thanks for all your answers...
I finally decided to implement my own solution using Visual Studio 2010 and the Office-Tools... This is not the "perfect" solution, but it was easy & fast to implement, while i still have the flexibility to change the documents witch excel or word...
Downside of course: You need Office installed.
It depends on how you get your template documents. For example, if you have others in your organization responsible for generating the "standard" invoice document, you'll probably have a solution that involves mail merges in the Microsoft Word API, because you need to work with Word-formatted input files. Alternately, if you are merely given the specs for the appearance of the document ("Logo in the top-right, 5 inches down, then a horizontal line two inches below that, then... etc.") You could do it entirely in code. Even if you're designing a solution from scratch, take into account who your document suppliers WILL be, and plan accordingly. Finally, if this is from-scratch for a small set of documents that won't change much (i.e., you're starting your own software company and want to send invoices) don't do it. Just buy something off the shelf or use Word :)
We use xaml FixedPage, can use a designer like Kazaml, it has a lot of layout flexablity, and databinding works great with dynamic objects like expando. In code we bind a datacontext and then render that to XPS, since we need the final output to be pdf we use GhostXPS which is free but has to be executed in a separate processs, there are third party fully managed converters for xps to pdf though.
We use Crystal Reports which comes free with Visual Studio. You can easily create a report/document that is bound to a database or unbound.
For example you could suppress the header and footer, expand the details section to be approx. A4 size, then add either bound fields or use parameters for unbound content. Then at runtime for bound documents set the selection formula to only pull in data for one transaction or for unbound documents just pass in the parameters.
A nice feature of Crystal Reports is there are export features, so export to PDF, Word, etc. Also it's easy to auto print to a specified printer.
Crystal reports can be a pain! On a basic level the outsourced developers for our in house software for Works Order, Invoices etc we use Dev Express although I think it can be pricey.
For reports being generated by the software I ended up choosing to have exports into a raw CSV which of course can be opened up by any spreadsheet software