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

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by Red1C3@lemmy.world to c/programming@programming.dev

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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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[–] Turun@feddit.de 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

How about generating latex source code, compiling it and getting the page count of the generated PDF? Reorder your set of questions and see if the result is better or worse. Optionally do it in a smart way to reduce the number of PDF compilations you have to do. (Simulated annealing comes to mind for example.)

I think it would be easier to find a library to find the last line on a PDF page than it is to parse unzipped odt files and basically write a layout engine that does the same as libre office just to get the number of pages.

Maybe you can even get Tex to put it in the log during compilation. That would be the most convenient option and seems reasonable to achieve.