Posted by Dan Rossi on 05/04/05 22:30

On 05/05/2005, at 1:47 AM, Kristen G. Thorson wrote:
>>
>
>
> Dan,
>
> I have done this before, but it was only a proof-of concept excercise
> for me, so my procedure may not work for you. My test was against an
> Amazon web service and generating a PDF from the XML returned to me.
>
> This method used Apache's FOP. Before executing the following code, I
> saved the XML returned from Amazon as a temp file ($xmlfile).
>
> $PDFfile = "$xmlfile.pdf";
> $callstring = "$FOPpath/fop.sh -xsl $xslforoot/$xslfofile -xml
> $xmlfile -pdf $PDFfile";
> $answer = shell_exec( $callstring );
> header( "Content-type: $ctype" );
> $pieces = explode( "/", $xmlfile );
> header( "Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=".$pieces[ count(
> $pieces )-1 ] );
> readfile( "$xmlfile.pdf" );
>
>
> I hope this is helpful to you,
> kgt
>
>

Hi yes this is exactly what i may have to do. I have tried all the
usual outlets in terms of subclasses of FPDF , all are limited and
crappy, it just cant do tables properly. The closest I got was with
PDML however it was still tedious to build a table with ! Now I think
processing for such a command line would take forever this is what I
need to do, a print button displays on the header of a form entry. What
i need to do is collect the data from that database entry and display
it as a view with the data rather than the form and make it printable
in a pdf. This ideally means generate xml from the db entry, save it as
a file, execute commandline with temp xml file, readfile the pdf. I
dont think it should take too long to output to the browser right ? I
think a step i'd like to skip is the readfile, and work out how to send
to standard output and use passthru ?

In the past I have used an app called HTMLDoc, its the bomb for making
pdf manuals with chapters and table of contents. It also requires
saving a temp html file and then sends the pdf as standard output.
However HTMLDoc is not free anymore, I only have one licence for that
to make docs only.

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