Timdams's Blog

A powerpoint .pptx to Latex .tex convertor tool

September 26, 2013 6 Comments

A colleague of mine is making some very nice Latex-based presentations, including a dynamically generated section-overview on each slide. Since all my current slidedecks are made in Powerpoint I started working on a small tool that converts .pptx to .tex latex files. (make note: this tool won’t work with oldschool .ppt files!)

The tool is far from done. But the basic functionality is there. Currently the tool converts a .pptx file to a .tex and keeps the following slide information:

All titles
All text/bulletitems
- Including identation
All section headers
Option to include hidden slides
All images
- Each image is extracted and save as a separate file

I’m using the Open XML SDK 2.0 which allows more easy parsing of .pptx using C#. More info on how the tool was made might show up here some day.
Other features that I’d like to include is the ability to export the notes (shouldn’t be a problem) and some simple text formatting information (bit harder).

You can download the sourcecode on github: https://github.com/timdams/Pptx2Tex

Adding a search contract to the Windows 8 Calibre frontend

December 11, 2012 Leave a comment

In this post I will show how simple it is to add a search contract to a Windows 8 Store app. This contract allows the user to search within your application from anywhere in Windows 8 using the search charm. We will use my Calibre frontend app to show this. Check this video to see the raw action of what we are making.

What we are building: the search in action after querying for books with “brown” in the authorname.

This is the second post of my quest on writing a Windows 8 Store app for Calibre. The previous post can be found here. Read more of this post

Filed under Uncategorized Tagged with c#, calibre, code, linq, win8, winrt, xaml

Writing a Calibre frontend for Windows8/WinRT using ‘SQLite for WinRT’

November 27, 2012 8 Comments

While developing a Windows Store frontend application for the Calibre ebookmanager, I’m hitting several bumps along the road. In this post I’ll explain some of the bumps and how I’ve tried to tackle them.

Basically they can be summarized as follows:

How to access a Sqlite database in a WinRT application
Circumvent file access limitation of SQLIte for WinRT
Load cover files of each book
Create incremental-loading Gridview using ISupportIncrementalLoading

Calibre is a great open source and free to use ebookmanager. It allows me to manage my ever-growing ebook-library and it supports lots of ebook-filetypes, including the ability to convert between the types.

My goal is to write a simple Windows Store application that acts as a frontend for the Calibre database. It will show my library in a visual appealing manner (aka TDPFAM, “The-design-principle-formerly-known-as-Metro”) and allow the user to rapidly query his database from anywhere in windows. At least that’s the idea. We’ll see where we end up (check here for a little video demonstrating the application I’m building).

Future follow ups on this project might be found here on the Calibre developer forum.

Early alpha of Calibre frontend, simply demonstration what can be done (check out the youtube movie). Note the layout that is based on one of the existing VS2012 WinRT project setup.

The original Calibre program

With this post I hope others get triggered to create their own Calibre frontend, because, knowing myself, I’ll get bored of the project pretty soon once I have to tackle the UI/UX stuff …which I don’t like.
Read more of this post

Filed under Uncategorized Tagged with c#, calibre, code, linq, win8, winrt, xaml

A WP7 databound graph control

May 30, 2012 3 Comments

For a project we are working on, we needed a simple (and free) WP7 graph usercontrol. The data which the usercontrol visualizes needs to be databound and each time new data arrives, the graph should update itself on-the-fly .In the following tutorial we’ll show how to create such a control from scratch (make note that normally this should also work in Silverlight or WPF projects).

A demo-solution of this tutorial can be downloaded here.

Creating an Intellisense compatible enum-based Dependency Property

May 30, 2012 5 Comments

Actually, this post has a way too fancy title , because in fact I will merely show that enum-based dependency properties are IntelliSense compatible “out-of-the-box”. (by the way, if you know all about dependcy properties: simply read the line in bold and you’ll know all there is to know).

When creating a (WP7/SL/WPF) usercontrol, one often ends up creating one more dependency properties (DP). Most of the times you only want a discrete set of possible values that can be assigned to the DP. The logical choice then of course is to have an enum-based DP.

Now, for the Intellisense to work it is important that you define the enum type OUTSIDE the usercontrols class. For example, suppose we have define the following enum:

public enum GraphTypes {Default, Point, Line}

Now, all that remains is to add a DP that uses this enum (remember that you can use the ‘dependencyproperty’ snippet that comes with VS):

        public static readonly DependencyProperty GraphTypeProperty =
            DependencyProperty.Register("GraphType", typeof (GraphTypes), typeof (GraphControl), new PropertyMetadata(GraphTypes.Default));

        public GraphTypes GraphType
        {
            get { return (GraphTypes) GetValue(GraphTypeProperty); }
            set { SetValue(GraphTypeProperty, value); }
        }

Once you now add the usercontrol elsewhere in your xaml-code, IntelliSense will happily show what values can be assigned to the DP:

There we go. That’s all there was too it.

Next post I’ll show how to create a WP7 user control to plot graphs using data binding. Consider some of the code here a sneak preview.

Filed under Uncategorized Tagged with c#, code, custom user control, dependencyproperty, enum, intellisense, silverlight, silverlight 4, tutorial, visual studio, wp7, wpf, xaml

Using delegates, func and lambdas: a tutorial with soldiers

April 19, 2012 12 Comments

In this tutorial, written for beginning programmers, I’d like to show a little demonstration on the usage of delegates and how we can go all crazy by refactoring and magically see all our duplicate code disappear.

Imagine we are writing the next ultimate Command&Conquer spinoff which can run on any computer …in console-mode. Read more of this post

Filed under Uncategorized Tagged with c#, code, delegate, delegates, event, linq, List, tutorial

Writing a WP7 website scraper application

April 16, 2012 22 Comments

In this tutorial I will explain how you write a WP7 application using the HtmlAgility Pack in order to use information scraped from a website.
Website scraping is the act of retrieving information from a website page. An act by some considered stealing, by others borrowing. Let’s leave that debate to the others. In this post I will show how easy it is to scrape content from a website so that you can (re)use it in your Windows Phone 7 application. As it is, this information will for the most part also work in other, non WP7, projects of course.
Sometimes website scraping is the only means available to consume certain information from a website. If the website doesn’t have some publicly available API or web service you can use you’re pretty much left with scraping, whether you like it or not.

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