Posted by AK on 10/13/73 11:41

A Clarification

The invoice email is sent from the server, not from our client side system.
It is a server side, automated cron tab, pdf generation and sending of the
pdf invoice by the 3party sender, that I am trying to accomplish.

AK


"AK" <nospam@itn.com> wrote in message
news:wQpOf.3428$gm.2718@tornado.texas.rr.com...
> Kinda new - well ,really new, but here goes.
>
> I have a mySQL database that resides on the third party commercial web
> server/service away from our offices. We upload data to that database, and
> then use scripts to extract various data elements and place them on an
> invoice which we email out to customers. (an invoice showing items,
> quantity, amounts etc.)
>
> No problem with extraction and sending of the email. Problem comes in that
> the formatting of the email is not "locked down. What I mean by this is
> that the columns of data that are supposed to line up, do so exactly when
> viewed on email program #1, but then are misaligned whe viewed with email
> program #2. (Took us a week to figure out it was the email viewer at the
> customers that was causing the "bad" behaviour.)
>
>
> Someone said that email formatting was squirrely like that and that we
> should consider creating a pdf invoice and then sending that out. This is
> what we want to try. (Yes, we can send a word document, etx, but want to
> try this pdf thing right now)
>
> I see in the php manual I got at the bookstore that pph can write data to
> a pdf, BUT, to me it seems like a pretty brute force raw-code method -
> almost as bad as coding an html webpage entirely by hand, instead of using
> a html page generator/widard.
>
> Question - Is there some utility/widard that folks use on the web server
> end to get data out of the My SQL and onto a pdf , which I would then send
> by email?
>
> Seems like ther must be, but, I am so in-initiated that I don't know what
> to look for. I think I am needing a utility that will write the
> appropriate php script based on where I set up tables etc on the pdf
> template page.
>
> Thanks.
>

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