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!
A docx is just a renamed zip archive with the XML data. You should be able to unzip it and use a parser to access that info directly. There are likely tools to do this for any relevant language. You can also find the official spec online with some more info.
Unfortunately, I can’t get into much more detail than that as my company actively develops similar tools and I’ve worked on their document renderers not too long ago.
No clue on the odt stuff. I worked on the MS fidelity part.
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?
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.
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
Yeah that’s what I’m searching for atm :/
Ultimately, no, not really, these formats are built to be “render-agnostic”, and there’s really no way to pre-calculate aspects of what the render will be without actually running it through the rendering engine. Which is, in theory, doable, without having to send the render output to an actual screen or printer, but the followup problem is that all renderers are not created equal. I.E. an engine for rendering a docx that you grab from NuGet or somewhere else is not guaranteed to produce the same output as what Microsoft Word will, not exactly.
If you need accuracy in predicting the rendered-size of various things, you really need to be running the documents through the same renderer that will be used to actually print/draw the documents for the user. If this is Microsoft Office, you can look into Office Interop protocols, which will let you make programmatic calls into the actual Office programs installed on the system, from your program. There ought to be a way to kick off rendering from there.