Watermarking word documents w/vent

Aspose.Words Product Family
1

Is there a way to manually use aspose.word to watermark a word document? We (univ. of utah IRB), as well as 24 other IRB centers at other universities, are using an application (webridge) that is using aspose.word to water mark word documents. To my knowledge, each of these centers has purchased aspose.word licenses at approx. $2K ea.

The program is not working and many of the end users are getting very irate. I don’t know if it is aspose.word or the webridge product but I’m having difficulty getting some vendor support.

It has fallen upon me to find and fix the problem. I believe that it is less then a year since we purchased the license, so we should still be eligible for upgrades.

The webridge app vendor has a script that integrates aspose.word into their product. The problem is that the script was designed to work with aspose.word 2.2.8. I have not been able to find out if it will work to install the latest version of aspose.word.

On the aspose side, in order to get support I’ve been asked to install the latest version of aspose.word. catch-22!

My question, is there a way to manually use aspose to insert a watermark into a word document so that we can verify that the watermarking problem is not an aspose.word issue? I think that you would want to keep 25 license buying centers in your customer base.

Thank you in advance.

Jim

2

We are willing to help, but we are not familar with webridge so we will need your cooperation.

I recommend you upgrade to the latest version of Aspose.Word since handling of many features in Word files has improved since then. I don’t know how you want to plan and stage thsuch upgrade, but I’m sure you first need to try it our in a test application.

To get things moving, find the piece of the webridge script that deals with aspose.word and attach as a file to this thread. It will only be visible to you and aspose support personnerl. Maybe we will be in a better position to help then.

It might also help if you describe or attach a word document that contains a watermark so we better understand what you are trying to achieve.

Have a look at Aspose.Word documentation to get a better idea about what its all about https://docs.aspose.com/words/net/

3

The webridge application is java based so I’m not sure yet what scripts that I can send that may be useful. The attached word doc is a sample of one of the types of files that will not watermark. My understanding is that most word docs have no problem being watermarked but we get about a dozen or so a day that will not mark. (such as the attached file).

I don’t know if it will make any sense to you but I will cut and paste the instructions that we have received from webridge to install aspose for use in the webridge app.

instructions.txt -------------------------------

Run the Aspose.Word.msi installer

Run installaspose.cmd from the command line making sure to pass the storeName as a paramater Example:
installaspose IRB

Run developmentmachine.exe and put appropriate license into the SYS_Aspose CDT.
Open EM and create a new entity type from xml using the WordMerge.xml file.

Thats it, you should now be able to watermark docuemnts.

------------------------ end: instructions.txt

installaspose.cmd ------------------------------------

“c:\Program Files\Webridge\Extranet\bin\nview” com.webridge.wom.test.LoadAssemblies -store %1 -replace Aspose.dll
“c:\Windows\microsoft.net\framework\v1.1.4322\gacutil” /i Aspose.Word.dll
c:\bounceall

---------------------- end: installaspose.cmd

From what I can figure out it looks like the Aspose.dll was written by webridge and the Aspose.Word.dll is generated as part of the aspose install.

I think that the WordMerge.xml file, mentioned in the install instructions is from webridge.

My background is primarily unix/linux so a lot of the windows processes are foriegn to me. On thing that I am curious about is that running the gacutil command as shown above has resulted in multipe entries for Aspose.Word in the c:\windows\assemblies directory. Does this matter? Can the files in this directory be deleted or do they need to be removed by some utility, ie gacutil.

Also, would it work to first convert the word file to a pdf, using aspose.pdf, and then watermark it?

Thank you for your help,

Jim

4

The point is that Aspose.Word does not watermwark documents by itself. Aspose.Word is just a class library that is called by some piece of webridge or java code somewhere in your project that invokes classes and methods of Aspose.Word to open, modify in some way and save the documents.

It is interesting to note that Aspose.Word is a .NET component and your webridge/java configuration is “not a very straightforward way to use Aspose.Word” I would say. I don’t know how your webridge app calls into a .NET component, probably via COM. These interoperability things are usually hair-raising not only to people who come from unix/linux background. But hopefully, this seems to be all sorted and working for you at the moment.

If you had access to that code and managed to show it to me - I would be able to tell if it will need changes because of upgrading to the newer Aspose.Word version. Normally customers (.NET developers) don’t need any help in doing this, they just download the msi or the dll and just use it.

It is important to note that Aspose.Word.dll is strong named (might be another new term for you). This normally means that it is not possible to use it just instead of the previous version without recompiling your project. However, this usually applies to .NET applications only.

So if your webridge app uses COM to call into Aspose.Word and if your COM code that works with Aspose.Word does not need modifications, then you should be able to just uninstall old Aspose.Word and install new one and it should all just work fine.