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[help] Are there tools for documents manipulating that can provide an approximate size of components (text included)? (lemmy.world)
submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by Red1C3@lemmy.world to c/programming@programming.dev
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Long story short, I want to build a system that reorders some components in a document file (be it a docx or odt, I don't have a hard constraint atm).

So my problem input should be a document file, and I need to be able to approximate the number of pages consumed by this document file, I also need to be able to get the height of individual components (like a single paragraph or a table) to have the data I need to rearrange so I can make the document have less pages.

I don't have a hard constraint on the programming language of the tool either (Python preferred), I prefer not embedding LibreOffice into my system.

Also I'm willing to hear other solutions (maybe my input is not the optimal thing I can use for this problem).

Thanks in advance!

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[-] brakenium@lemm.ee 4 points 9 months ago

This is very different from docz or odt, but maybe its worth looking into converting markdown or latex to PDF with something like pandoc. Maybe that or some other more open and less complex format might help with this?

[-] Red1C3@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

My requirements on the format itself are not that high, at best I need to be able to add images and tables, I can reason with any format that will work with that, maybe convert it later if I need to.

[-] brakenium@lemm.ee 2 points 9 months ago

Markdown supports images and tables. It may depend on the rendered though. The GitHub flavour of Markdown supports this for example and I expect Latex supports it too. If existing tools don't exist to get the height of elements you can probably make it yourself fairly easily if you you the specific font and styling the renderer uses. You'd just have to parse the file, which is basically plain text, and run the same calculations the renderer would. For which approximation might be fine depending on the use case

[-] Red1C3@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago

Yeah that's what I'm searching for atm :/

this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
11 points (100.0% liked)

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