I'm a developer advocate who loves the web platform, APIs, AI, and basically just anything involving code. I love to write about technology and share that with others. I've got fun stuff to show you and I'm so happy you're here!
Welcome to my corner of the internet where I share insights about development, best and sometimes questionable practices, and cat demos.
Happy Sunday, and happy "Saints have a bye week so they can't lose" day. That may be bitter and I shouldn't write off their season yet but... maybe next year? Of course, this is just one more kinda crappy thing going on amongst a giant pile of other crappy things so - let's just get right to the links, shall we?
Last week I shared a demo ("Generating PDFs from Word Templates with officeParser") that made use of the awesome officeParser open source library. That demo was a simple "customer report" web app that took custom data and a Word template. Once the form was submitted, the library converted tokens in the Word template to real data and output a PDF. I decided to build another demo using the library, this time on the server with a simple Node.js script.
Everyone likes to talk about light versus dark theme while no one is addressing the real need for our users - a proper unicorn theme. I mean, take a look at this beauty:
This will be a short one. I've talked about embedding PDFs on web pages for probably close to ten years now. Blame Adobe. Blame me being a nerd and finding this stuff interesting. Blame whoever. While I've blogged about the topic, I've also actually done that on my site here, in a variety of different ways.
Wowza - I'm like nearly a month late on this. This is where I'd try to come up with a good excuse, but I think if I just randomly point around at things and said... "life" most of you would completely understand where I'm coming from. It's been a difficult few months for myself, and for nearly every person I know. This week I'm going to try focus on the positive and the things that make me smile, and I hope all my lovely readers can do the same!
I've been singing the praises of the officeParser library for a while. It's an open source JavaScript library that can parse, extract, and convert between PDFs and Office documents, as well as OpenOffice, ePub and more. My demos have all focused on client-side examples but obviously the library would work great in a server side workflow as well. I haven't worked at Adobe for years now, but I still get strangely excited working with documents. I'll just add that to the long list of reasons I'm a big nerd.
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