[ciapug] PDF's

[David Champion]

Dave J. Hala Jr. wrote:
> I have an application that I populate with data from a table. Basically,
> I read the data from a table and create an html page, then I use htmldoc
> to convert it into a pdf.  
> 
> I'd like to try something differant. I remember seeing something
> somewhere that allowed you to create a pdf, then populate the PDF by
> passing the data to it as parameters.
> 
> Does anyone do this?  What tools are you using?
> 
> 
> :) Dave

This is the one that Lathrop mentioned (ezpdf) :

http://www.ros.co.nz/pdf

I've done some stuff in the past using phpPDFLib... which was a lot 
harder to work with, and I was doing a lot more low-level "go to these 
coordinates, write some text, draw a line...". The hardest part was just 
getting PDFLib to work right.

If you check out freshmeat.net, search for "php pdf" there seem to be a 
lot of projects - I see a couple there that claim to have template 
systems. Those usually involve creating a template in some markup 
language like XML, then you can insert dynamic text into them.

We used a proprietary Windows PDF generator a few years ago, which had 
it's own markup language for creating templates. I don't recall the name 
of it, but they were allegedly working on a Linux version at the time.

-dc