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kguske
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Joined: Jun 04, 2004
Posts: 6432

PostPosted: Mon Aug 14, 2006 10:38 pm Reply with quote

I was checking into generating PDFs from PHP for 2 different projects, and rediscovered FPDF, the free PHP class for generating PDF files. As with all great classes, there are a number of extensions, some with really nice functionality. Part of the problem is that the base class has some important limits, namely it's support for a subset of HTML tags.

I remembered that NSN-News uses FPDF to generate PDFs of stories, so I decided to checkout the approach used there, hoping that it added some of the extensions for additional tag support. Of course, NSN 2.0 has been around for some time, so I shouldn't have been surprised that it supports the same basic A and B tags as the base FPDF. That might be OK for stories, though the stories frequently won't look like they do in Nuke (FPDF has limited font, CSS support, too). Still, that's better than nothing!

I think there is potential for greater use of this class - not only within NSN-News, but also with other modules like HTML Newsletter, a calendar, or any other type of content where being able to print content on pages correctly is important.

So, with the flurry of additions and extensions to FPDF, which are the most promising? Here's my list:
    FPDI - read pages from existing PDF documents and to use them as templates, concatenate PDFs, and has some interesting pagination features
    TCPDF - adds UTF-8, barcode, GIF support (FPDF supports JPEG and PNG GIF)
    Andrei Bintintan's Table Extension w/ MultiCellTag method functionality
    cPdfWriter combines a lot of the fancier output extensions

What are your thoughts about this? Are the limitations acceptable? Does it matter? What else would be useful?

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kguske







PostPosted: Wed Aug 16, 2006 10:23 am Reply with quote

bump?
 
evaders99
Former Moderator in Good Standing



Joined: Apr 30, 2004
Posts: 3221

PostPosted: Wed Aug 16, 2006 1:13 pm Reply with quote

Well personally I hate PDF... and all the junk that Adobe Acrobat needs. It takes forever to load. I use one of the free PDF readers and its so much faster. I've tried scriptiing with one of Adobe's toolkits.. just terible how much you need to do. Glad there's something free for me to try.

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kguske







PostPosted: Wed Aug 16, 2006 2:57 pm Reply with quote

Interesting - how about some links to the free PDF readers?

Being able to generate a PDF on your site gives you the ability to control printing - great for things that need headers (forms, membership lists, calendars, etc.). I'm not aware of any other viable alternatives for that, but I am definitely open for suggestions...
 
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