This is a client-side javascript application for generating scannable paper forms from XLSX spreadsheets. Scannable in the sense that the app generates a template that can be used with ODK Scan to automatically read which bubbles are filled in like a scantron test.
There is some documentation here
XLSX Generator is all client side JavaScript. There is no server component, so you can download and open it from your filesystem.
The pipeline is as followes. The XLSX file is converted to JSON with some basic processing to nest groups and parse type parameters (in XLSXConverter). Next, that JSON is preprocessed in app.js script then fed into Handlebars templates (in index.html) to generate the form's HTML structure. After the HTML is rendered, jQuery is used to construct the template.json based on it's layout, and html2canvas is used to draw the form.jpg. Finally, all the json and jpgs for all the pages gets zipped into a single file that is made available for download.
The test.html page will generate a form from the scanExample.xlsx file in this repo and compare it with the output in the testExpectedOutput folder. It will print a json diff and a visual form image diff at the bottom of the page. However, if you run the test in Firefox, you will see some differences, because the expected output was generated in Chrome.
The TemplateMaker tool can be useful for verifying that the JSON template lines up with the image.
- Multiple segments per field in the JSON output appears to be unnecessairy.
- It might be a good idea to make forms denser.