Composer

Composer is a utility for visualizing XML Printer output, defining document types for Parser and other minor tasks. The main Composer window is as following.

Composer can be launched from your Start Menu (if you checked the option in installation), XML Printer Settings or from command line.

Toolbar

Composer’s toolbar allows you easy document handling and navigation.

1. Opens an existing XML Printer document (also accessible via Ctrl+O). Any opened document will be closed along with definition sidebar (if any open).
2. Converts the opened document into a PDF.
3. Prints the opened XML document on a selected physical printer.
4. Shows the current page number. You ca type into this field directly for fast page navigation. The number after the forward-slash show the total number of pages in this document.
5. Navigates to the previous page (if any). Keyboard shortcut is Ctrl+PageUp
6. Navigates to the next page (if any). Keyboard shortcut is Ctrl+PageDown
7. Shows the current zoom level in percent. You can type directly into this field for a non-predefined level.
8. Zooms in the document by one level (Ctrl+Plus)
9. Zooms out the document by one level (Ctrl+Minus)
10. Toggles text justification (Ctrl+T), some documents may display garbled text in certain zoom levels. Toggling the text justification may fix this visual issue.
11. Shows a basic “About” dialog box.

Other shortcuts not mentioned above include:

• Up/down/left/right arrows: Document scrolling
• Home/end: Scrolls the current page to the top/bottom
• PageUp/PageDown: Vertical scrolling (faster than arrows)
• Ctrl+MouseWheel: Zoom in/out
• Mouse drag: Moves the document page

Document types

Apart from previewing printed XML files, the Composer also helps creating document types for use with Parser (more details and actual type definition is described here). You can start adding or managing document types by going to File -> Document types… or by pressing Ctrl+D:

The basic idea behind document types and Parser in general is that you may have documents that are pretty much alike (e.g. an invoice from a specific supplier or system). To filter the data out, you will create a document type called (for example) InvoiceFromSupplier1 and add a sample document to that type. Then you tell XML Printer what fields to search for and where to search for them by selecting the fields on the sample document. XML Printer will then be able to learn and recognize other similar invoices from that supplier.

For strict document layouts you’ll be fine with one sample document per document type. A problem may arise when you get a second invoice with a different item count from the first (sample) invoice. To let XML Printer know that the item count may vary, you can add another sample document to the document type (this time with a different item count) and XML Printer will try to understand and remember that.

To create a new document type, open an XML document in the Composer, press Ctrl+D and start typing into the text box on the bottom (please note that you can only user basic characters, hyphen or underscore, other characters will not be accepted). After entering the name press Add and the new type is created and automatically applied to the opened document. XML Printer will remove all graphics from the document, as this kind of information is irrelevant to the learning and parsing process.

To open documents within an existing document type, select the document type in the list and press Browse documents.

To add the currently opened document to a document type, open the document in the Composer, press Ctrl+D, select the correct document type in the list and press Apply type.

If you want to test a document against a document type (i.e. how would Parser handle a specific document) without adding it to the sample documents, open the document in Composer, press Ctrl+D, select a document type and press Test on document.