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Author Topic: Text Viewer  (Read 1140 times)

James Zukowski

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Text Viewer
« on: December 01, 2020, 06:54:32 PM »
Since migrating from BBx a couple of years ago, the users on the system love the Viewer. However, they hate that they can't copy text from the viewer to paste into Excel, Word, whatever.

Does anyone have any insights into a text-oriented Viewer alternative that would allow that? Currently, we're only outputting basic text (with some occasional bold modifiers); no 'text' or other mnemonics.

Thanks, all!
James Zukowski
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Stéphane Devouard

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Re: Text Viewer
« Reply #1 on: December 01, 2020, 10:49:24 PM »
James

That’s strange as *viewer* is supposed to allow copy to the clipboard by default
If using the more complex Print Preview which was written by Gord, I believe there is a property of the preview object that controls being able to copy from the document or not.

Otherwise, you can give  a try outputting to [lcl]*pdf*;view

PxPlus will create a PDF in a temp directory, will push it to the client (WindX or browser), then will remove the temp document right away when running iNomads, or once the PDF reader is closed when running with WindX.
From there the end-user can print the PDF, save it locally, and of course copy text from it to the clipboard and paste it wherever they want.

Hope this helps
Stéphane Devouard
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James Zukowski

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Re: Text Viewer
« Reply #2 on: December 02, 2020, 04:58:50 PM »
Evidently, PxPlus now ships with Gord's Print Preview as the standard driver selected for *viewer*. There doesn't seem to be any property controlling text copy capabilities. Copying/saving of [PDF] files, yes; text, no.
I think I found the viewer driver you were mentioning. It has 4 zoom levels, and allows copying to the clipboard - of the entire file. There is no select+copy. With some work, though, I can probably get that going, as well as some different zoom controls.
Thanks for pointing this out. I thought there was something like this around.
Not sure if the PDF/View option would be viable in our situation. I can review that, too.

Stay safe!
James Zukowski
Sr. Developer - J&E

BRAND>SAFWAY
Brand Industrial Services

Stéphane Devouard

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Re: Text Viewer
« Reply #3 on: December 03, 2020, 03:01:46 AM »
Not sure if the PDF/View option would be viable in our situation. I can review that, too.

Stay safe!

That's what I would suggest, as any PDF Reader will allow you to copy portions of text
The nice thing about *pdf*;view is that it is really automagic without any further coding, it supports WindX & iNomads, and tries to avoid cluttering your server and client directories with temporary files.

Hope this helps
Stéphane Devouard
Portfolio | Work