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[help] Are there tools for documents manipulating that can provide an approximate size of components (text included)? (self.programming)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by Red1C3 to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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.