Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with automation and pdf

Automated PDF modification

mnemonic — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 13:55:40 -0800

Is there an automated way of placing elements from one PDF file into another? Open to coding this via Python if a relevant module exists. I have two pdf's, Doc 1 and Doc 2. All pages in both documents are US Letter sized. Doc 1 contains large tables of values (generated in Excel with PDFCreator), one per page; this is the only content on the pages. Doc 2 contains pages with my company's border, and header info (title, page # etc.). Doc 1 tables go into Doc 2 bordered pages. I would like an automated way of taking the tables of Doc 1, and placing each into a separate page in Doc 2, without overlapping elements.

I'm decently proficient in Python and think I could code something if some pdf/vector graphics handling modules exist. I've done nontrivial programming with the xlrd3 module for working with our Excel files. How I think the code for this might work:

Open Doc 1, Doc 2 as vector images
For each page in Doc 1, Doc 2:
- Get content bounds in Doc 1
- Scale content in Doc 1 to fit in Doc 2 borders
- Insert in Doc 2 at [coordinates]

What Python modules would I need to do this? Or any other approaches would be welcome.

Notes
- This task recurs in my work every few weeks, and the pages can total over a hundred. I handle this currently by printing out Doc 2 (page borders), then refeeding the pages into the printer and printing Doc 1. This is inconvenient because the printer often fails to grab the pages, and because I have to run back to my computer to issue the next job (it's not actually 2 files each time, more like 14 separate pairs of such files, that must be printed separately), and occasionally I can get tripped up by coworkers printing over my pages.

- I often paste Excel tables directly into Word docs. This fails here because the formatting gets mangled in Word from having lots of merged cells and landscape oriented tables in portrait orientation pages. I can sort of transpose the tables in Excel, and set the text orientation in Word to vertical, but each table requires a ton of cleanup, and there are many of them.

- I can manually combine the docs by opening the PDFs in Inkscape (or other vector illustrating program), but again, 100+ tables. Inkscape opens up one page at a time.

Emacs wizardry for the non-programmer.

Barry B. Palindromer — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 09:37:05 -0800

How can I automate emacs to open a file, execute a bunch of macros, then save the file in a new format? I need to extract bookmarks from large PDFs into text files importable into MS Access. I have been using emacs to open the file, then used 5-6 macros to extract the bookmarks and format it properly to be imported into Access. This gets extremely tedious, I have about 100 files to convert.

Is there a more elegant or convenient way to do this? I would love to be able to automate it in emacs. I am not a programmer, and although I have tried to figure out how to do this with elisp, it just doesn't make sense to me. I'm running emacs 22.2.1 on Windows and Acrobat 6 and 7 standard.

Configured, Boiled Down Numbers Please

rokusan — Wed, 14 May 2008 21:36:20 -0800

A good, modern, local website traffic stats solution? I used to know this stuff, but it's been many years and technology changes, yadda yadda, and this has some special odd requirements... so I prefer some hive mind opinions...

I have a colleague looking for a good solution to traffic stats reporting. He is responsible for dozens of websites, with new ones being added/removed every couple of weeks -- promotions and projects from various departments. He has access to combined/extended Apache logs (regular + referrer) already, but since he controls the websites, he is also open to a javascript-triggered thingie on each page, and a custom server that logs things itself. Either is fine as long as it churns out the results.

For results, he'd need an assortment of the usual hits/views/referrers stuff (visitors from Chile, most popular pages this week, hits on this certain link), but boiled down nicely like so:

1) takes raw logs and turns them into something human-readable.
2) scheduled (weekly or monthly) reports automatically saved as fixed files (auditable, this not recreated each time it's run).
3) reports showing just the info he wants* e-mailed to him as attachments (PDF, ideally, but text files would work) so he can present to management.
4) the ability to request custom reports (the period from Sept 1 to Sept 14, users from China only) on demand, presumably from some kind of web interface -- an on-the-fly config run one-off.
5) the ability to combine or separate data from diff sites/logs by configuration. (that is: these two sites are the same, but these four are all to be tracked separately)

* I don't have a list, but he says it will be one or two pages and NOT change over time. A template of certain reports?

He is considering hiring a human being part-time to do this with some offline program as a secretarial task every week... but that struck me as crazy since it's automatable, right? Right? Hm.

It can't be Google Analytics, sadly for me (I know how to use that) and for privacy/security reasons he'd prefer something running on his own Un*x server rather than a web service.... whether it's the same server as the websites or another doesn't matter, as long as he can control access and keep the data private.

In the old days, I would say this all called for urchin or awstats, I think... plus some magic I don't know about to turn the results into pretty reports and mail them from a big old cron job.

From my perspective (helping find/source/make/install this), I'd be fine with something very complicated that I can tweak the configuration of to produce just what he's asking for -- and no more.

Or if something does all the processing, will run reports on a schedule and produce some kind of manageable (parsable?) output like plain flat tables, I can probably manage turning that into pretty documents and mailing them out with additional scripty code that I can stumble through.

Open source and hackable preferred, because of the configurability and tweakiness required... or guidance to existing things that can be cobbled together. If someone has built/integrated one of these before, or something similar, please mefi-mail me and maybe it's easy work, too. I may have overcommitted myself in trying to help.

Automatically PDF a website?

gfroese — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 11:31:48 -0800

How can I automate printing a complete website to PDF?

I need to be able to show what the site looked like on any given date. The site is a sales tool and therefore requires user input on every page, so simply spidering the site is not adequate.

Because the site requires user input all over the place, I'd somehow need to supply the tool with data so it could be fully automated.

Are there tools out there that could do this?

Note: It doesn't necessarily have to be output to PDF, just something manageable and static.

Can I automate the creation of PDFs from a large number of Word documents?

ParisParamus — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 10:35:23 -0800

Acrobat Filter. In Mac OS 9.2, I regularly create a large number of PDFs from Word files using Distiller 5.0. The problem is, I do this for 30 large files every 10 days, and must manually first create .ps files, and then distill them. The process takes more than 1 hour, during which I must open Each Word file to .ps "print" it. Short of buying a new copy of Acrobat for $300 and/or an OS X computer, is there any way to automate this process?