queXF

Boxes not recognised when banding

Asked by Mark Carver

I'm trying to band a form which I made with limesurvey. Unfortunately I can't use the XML banding form from limesurvey, because I edited the pdf using Acrobat to get it down from 8 pages to 4. When I draw a box over my multiple choice selections, the box just fills with green lines. When I do the same for a large free text area, it fills with vertical green lines - it's as if the banding is seeing it as hundreds of small boxes.

I'm using an industrial scanner so to band I just did an output to a pdf of 300dpi in monochrome, so it's not actually a re-scanned form but the banding is so far out that this surely can't be the cause.

Alternatively, I'm happy to edit my limesurvey banding xml file with what I assume are pixel coordinates, can you explain how tlx5 tly6 brx7 bry8 describes a page and location on that page?

Any help much appreciated - I've spent 3 days getting to grips with this because my university just has an old OMR scanner and I desperately want to show how surveys can be more ambitious!

Thank you

Mark

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Adam Zammit
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Best Adam Zammit (adamzammit) said : 		#1

Dear Mark,

This is occurring as the default background for a PDF form generated via Limesurvey using queXML is grey in colour, then when converted to monochrome by queXF appears to have lots of small dots.

Please scan the form using your scanner at monochrome and 300dpi, and adjust the scanning brightness/contrast settings so that the grey background is ignored. Then use this form for manual banding.

If you edit the banding XML file manually - yes it uses pixel coordinates where the page is assumed to be 300dpi.

Each page in the banding XML File should fall within a <page> tag. The <id> element should match the barcode on that page. The <tlx>,<tly>,etc elements under the page tag refer to the intersection of the corner lines in the top left corner, top right corner, bottom left and bottom right corners.

Good luck with your form. If you still run in to trouble please send a page from the form (both scanned and original) to me directly and I'll look into it further.

Regards,
Adam Zammit

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Mark Carver (markcarver1984) said : 		#2

Worked a treat - I actually thought the background was needed for contrast, thanks for clearing that up.

Mark

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Mark Carver (markcarver1984) said : 		#3

Thanks Adam Zammit, that solved my question.