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Archive for December, 2014
Yet another couple of glitches solved in setting up Outlook 2013 with Gmail IMAP for GoogleApps
2014/12/19
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- I googled and followed this useful guide. However, a couple of glitches remained:
- Connection to Incoming mail server fails if you really just put your username:
- put instead of username@companygoogledomain.com:

- Test send of email message through outgoing server fails if you just followed instructions:

- Click on button: “More” / tab: “Outgoing Server” / do check box “My outgoing server requires authentication ” and log on (I now prefer to be explicit, after the initial mixup of usernames for incoming and outgoing), enter your full user@compgoogledomain.com and password. No need to enable SPA, though.

- Viola
(and quousque tandem…, sigh
).
Categories: e-infrastructure, office-software
2013, gmail, imap, outlook
Fun with .docx to .html transforms by means of HtmlConverter from PowerTools for Open XML
2014/12/15
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- The transform is FOSS and platform-independent:
- It neither requires Office nor Windows (The OpenXML SDK runs on Linux via Mono on the server.
- However, the most recent installment of Powertools for OpenXML, a high-level API to the OpenXML SDK, comes with a PowerShell interface (benefit: no Visual studio requirement).
- Valuable features of the transform, among many other things, are:
- HtmlConverter is able to translate MS-Word styles into CSS (insofar needed – my code style has “No proofing” set, however, this cannot be implemented on the WWW), so the layout is preserved as designed, but w/o need for inline formatting:
span.pt-StrongEmphasis-000052 {
font-family: Calibri;
font-size: 11pt;
font-style: italic;
font-weight: bold;
margin: 0in;
padding: 0in;
}
span.pt-lowCodeConsoleChar0 {
color: #FFFFFF;
background: #000000;
font-family: Consolas;
font-size: 10pt;
font-weight: normal;
margin: 0in;
padding: 0in;
}
<h3 dir="ltr" class="pt-000040">
<span class="pt-000041">2.2.1</span><span class="pt-000042"><span class="pt-000043">&nbsp;</span></span><span class="pt-Heading2Char"><b>References</b></span>
</h3>
<p dir="ltr" class="pt-BodyText">
<span class="pt-DefaultParagraphFont-000003"><br />
&lrm;</span><span class="pt-000000">&nbsp;</span>
</p>
<h1 dir="ltr" class="pt-000006">
<span class="pt-000007"><b>3</b></span><span class="pt-000008"><b><span class="pt-000009">&nbsp;</span></b></span><span class="pt-Heading1Char"><b>Introduction</b></span>
</h1>
<h2 dir="ltr" class="pt-000018">
<span class="pt-000019">3.1</span><span class="pt-000020"><span class="pt-000021">&nbsp;</span></span><span class="pt-Heading2Char"><b>Purpose of Document</b></span>
</h2>
- There are many more options that I have not yet tried:
SimplifyMarkupSettings simplifyMarkupSettings = new SimplifyMarkupSettings
{
RemoveComments = true,
RemoveContentControls = true,
RemoveEndAndFootNotes = true,
RemoveFieldCodes = false,
RemoveLastRenderedPageBreak = true,
RemovePermissions = true,
RemoveProof = true,
RemoveRsidInfo = true,
RemoveSmartTags = true,
RemoveSoftHyphens = true,
RemoveGoBackBookmark = true,
ReplaceTabsWithSpaces = false,
};
MarkupSimplifier.SimplifyMarkup(wordDoc, simplifyMarkupSettings);
FormattingAssemblerSettings formattingAssemblerSettings = new FormattingAssemblerSettings
{
RemoveStyleNamesFromParagraphAndRunProperties = false,
ClearStyles = false,
RestrictToSupportedLanguages = htmlConverterSettings.RestrictToSupportedLanguages,
RestrictToSupportedNumberingFormats = htmlConverterSettings.RestrictToSupportedNumberingFormats,
CreateHtmlConverterAnnotationAttributes = true,
OrderElementsPerStandard = false,
ListItemRetrieverSettings = new ListItemRetrieverSettings()
{
ListItemTextImplementations = htmlConverterSettings.ListItemImplementations,
},
};
- One would really wish there was a way to get such HTML cleaned up automatically (ouch!):
<span class="pt-DefaultParagraphFont-000006">M</span>
<span class="pt-DefaultParagraphFont-000006">anaged requirements for system integration&nbsp;</span>
<span class="pt-DefaultParagraphFont-000006">of Center</span>
<span class="pt-DefaultParagraphFont-000006">&nbsp;</span>
<span class="pt-DefaultParagraphFont-000006">software&nbsp;</span>
<span class="pt-DefaultParagraphFont-000006">with&nbsp;</span>
<span class="pt-DefaultParagraphFont-000006">iLearning</span>
<span class="pt-DefaultParagraphFont-000006">&nbsp;and with content production and management (BPD). To mitigate lack of integration of $50k LMS software investment into departmental workflow</span>
<span class="pt-DefaultParagraphFont-000006">,</span>
<span class="pt-DefaultParagraphFont-000006">&nbsp;</span>
<span class="pt-DefaultParagraphFont-000006">developed&nbsp;</span>
<span class="pt-DefaultParagraphFont-000006">and documented&nbsp;</span>
<span class="pt-DefaultParagraphFont-000006">software to automate</span>
<span class="pt-DefaultParagraphFont-000006">&nbsp;creation of 4K+ user accounts p.a., 30K+ learning documents and 100K+ interactive content paths in LMS.</span>
- There are also much more serious conversion errors:
- MS-Word displays a plain text content control and a repeating section content control within a table, containing one Combobox and one plain text content control per row, perfectly:

- Convert-DocxToHtml gobbles the content completely (and so does Google Docs Preview):
The underlying HTML has just a blank table under each heading:
<div class="pt-000001"> <p dir="ltr" class="pt-qiCVHeading1"> <span class="pt-DefaultParagraphFont-000002">Profile</span> </p> </div> <div align="left"> <table border="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" dir="ltr" class="pt-000003" /> </div> <div class="pt-000001"> <p dir="ltr" class="pt-qiCVHeading1"> <span class="pt-DefaultParagraphFont-000002">Technologies</span> </p> </div> <div align="left"> <table border="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" dir="ltr" class="pt-000003" /> </div> - MS-Word shows:
Yet need to look in to the underlying XML to see whether the .docx is to blame for that… - But HtmlConverter output in IE or Firefox:
The underlying HTML reveals that the css does not get applied in the right place:
- MS-Word displays a plain text content control and a repeating section content control within a table, containing one Combobox and one plain text content control per row, perfectly:
<tr>
<td class="pt-000079">
<p dir="ltr" class="pt-BodyTextSmall">
<span class="pt-BodyTextSmallChar-000081">AD</span>
</p>
</td>
<td colspan="2" class="pt-000079">
<p dir="ltr" class="pt-BodyTextSmall">
<span class="pt-BodyTextSmallChar-000081">Active Driector, Microsfot&rsquo;s directory implementation.</span>
</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="pt-000086">
<p dir="ltr" class="pt-BodyTextSmall">
<span class="pt-000085">&nbsp;</span>
</p>
</td>
<td colspan="2" class="pt-000086">
<p dir="ltr" class="pt-BodyTextSmall">
<span class="pt-000085">&nbsp;</span>
</p>
</td>
</tr>
- One could imagine MS-Word acting less strictly than OpenXML PowerTools:Convert-DocxToHtml, like a web-browser’s parser tolerates and displays bad HTML. However, not only would need to be justified how MS-Word can also serve as the originating HTML WYSIWYG editor. The OpenXML PowerTools:Get-OpenXmlValidationErrors for both of the above documents does not seem to find any OpenXML errors that could explain the bad conversion (other than dozens of Sch_UndeclaredAttribute errors (Version-related? Not sure how this could be) , there is only a Pkg_PartIsNotAllowed relating to a glossary).
- Also yet to do:
- When (not always!) does my page title end up as empty?
<title></title>
- Defaults to doctype xhtml, not html(5).
- When (not always!) does my page title end up as empty?
- Done:
- Pretty-printing. The HtmlConverter output defaults to all content (not css ) on 1 line (e.g. in the example from which above code is taken, 90000chars long). For human readability, and also possibly git tracking, pretty-printing would be better. Can be enforced like so (is there a better way? cannot see a user-configurable option for the SaveOptions enumeration):
openXml\OxPt\OxPtCmdlets\OxPtHelper.cs:var htmlString = html.ToString(SaveOptions.None); // trp: requesting pretty-printing, was:html.ToString(SaveOptions.DisableFormatting);
How to watch a task you did not create in Redmine
2014/12/15
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- “Watching” tasks, i.e. receiving notifications of task updates, is the default for tasks – if you created them.
- “Watching” can also be turned on per task. Go to “issues”,
, click on the first task. - In the upper right of the task page, click “Watch”,

- Then click “next” to cycle through all tasks. A bit tedious even for small projects – is there a way to default to “watching all”. It does not come with the roles (I tried):

Categories: service-is-project-managing
notifications, redmine, watching


A little addendum about data types to the +N(“comment”) in-cell formula comment trick in Excel
=IF(
OR(
ISBLANK(
[Related issues]
),
( ISERR(
FIND(
“#“,
[Related issues]
)
) )
) +
N(
“do nothing if no related task in col:related issues“
),
““,
IF(
NOT(
ISERR(
FIND(
“,“,
[Related issues]
)
)
) +
N(
“do nothing if no 2nd value in col:related issues“
),
CONCATENATE(
MID(
MID(
[Related issues],
FIND(
“,“,
[Related issues]
) + 2,
LEN(
[Related issues]
) –
FIND(
“,“,
[Related issues]
) + 1 +
N(
“extracted the 2nd value from col:related issues“
)
),
FIND(
“#“,
MID(
[Related issues],
FIND(
“,“,
[Related issues]
) + 2,
LEN(
[Related issues]
) –
FIND(
“,“,
[Related issues]
) + 1
)
) + 1,
4
) +
N(
“extracted the 4# of id of related issue“
),
MID(
MID(
[Relatedissues],
FIND(
“,“,
[Relatedissues]
) + 2,
LEN(
[Relatedissues]
) –
FIND(
“,“,
[Relatedissues]
) + 1
),
FIND(
“ “,
MID(
[Related issues],
FIND(
“,“,
[Related issues]
) + 2,
LEN(
[Related issues]
) –
FIND(
“,“,
[Related issues]
) + 1
)
) + 1,
2 +
N(
“appended to or from to the 4# of id of related issue“
)
)
),
““
)
)