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Posted by Good Man on 09/25/07 18:40
"Steve" <no.one@example.com> wrote in news:WO9Ki.39$kv3.0@newsfe12.lga:
> since people have an affinity to paper copies, printing has become an
> issue with some reports i'm generating. it seems incovenient to the
> end-users to have to set the orientation to landscape and their
> margins to 0.25 - which results in a beautiful report. they want a
> link to download a pdf version that fills all of their needs/wants -
> something to store/print without having to muck with printer settings.
>
> i've looked at fpdf for generating the pdf itself, but i'd really love
> not having to create a wrapper for it that will take the html and feed
> it to fpdf including the @media print css that is applied. is there
> something out there that would do this already? i'd love to use an
> ob_start callback to pump the html to said wrapper and be done with
> it.
>
> ideas, suggestions?
I prepare nice-looking, properly formatted PDFs quite often via PHP, but
I don't know if my solution is feasible for you. My solution is the
product Prince (http://www.princexml.com/ ) which is able to take XML
(ie: XHTML) or even just plain HTML and turn it into a PDF with *full
and complete CSS support*. It's bloody brilliant, but here's the
"unfeasible (infeasible?)" part: it costs $3800USD for a server license.
That being said, if you send them a nice email when you're ready to buy
it (you can d/l a free working version that outputs watermarks) and
plead "im poor", they might offer you a discount (we got it at half the
price - the PDFs we're generating aren't really making us more money).
So, I fopen my php page, echo/save it as a .html file, then send the
html file to Prince via the PHP api class they supply.
I must say it works *brilliantly* and really there is no other product
on the market that comes even remotely close in terms of functionality
and ease of use. You can set page margins, footers, headers, page
numbering, font embedding, bookmarks, security settings, etc etc. Visit
the website for more info. Their tech support is fantastic, and a few
'requests' that I've made quickly found their way into published
releases.
For those who understand that good PDF output requires more than
printing from the browser with a "print" stylesheet, this is the product
for you.
I am a highly satisfied customer!
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