other PDF libraries???

Anon

Does anyone know of alternative PDF libraries to ClipPDF pdflib?? By alternatives, I mean free or lower cost for commercial use?

Thanks

Chris

russ68

I agree, I need a unlimited license but there is no way I can get the $25,000 for the unlimited license. It seems strange php is offically supporting a non-GPL third-party. If you find anything, and I've looked everywhere, please email me. There is two php/pdf classes at sourceforge, but they both look like they require pdflib.
Russ

Anon

I did find an alternative that you may be interested in exploring. I have yet to get it all working, but that is just a matter of not enough time. In my "day job" I'm implementing a function on a bank site that creates statements "on the fly". One of my developers found a free Java library that we're now using. It's well written, highly functional and extremely fast. That application is using a JSP, but for PHP use all that SHOULD he required is what's outlined in the article on this site. I have yet Java enable my installation, hoping to get to it soon. The hosting provider I'm using is actually the comercial support organization for the Postgresql database - and they seem extremely competant in all things PHP as well.
On the other hand - you can create RTF directly in PHP from the published spec. RTF supports fairly complex formatting.
It's difficult to find a lot of printing related support. Most of the people inthese forums are at the "mySQL database driven website" stage - with little understanding of web based business applications.

Chris

Anon

Dear Chris,

unfortunately yo do not mention the adress where one can get the alternative you are talking about. Perhaps you can write it down here - some time. And perhaps you can add a note about where I can find the specs of RTF fast.

Thanks for your efforts

Andreas

Anon

Hi,

You can check this site :
http://fpdf.multimania.com

this is a very good french alternative to pdflib, it require no specific php extention to setup.

Hope that can help.

Anon

Bonjour frouni!

Merci beaucoup! I'm sorry, that's all my active French - but I can read the text on the mentioned site 😉 Thanks for your Mail, this site is very interesting. What I am still missing, is a possibility to open and modify an existing pdf-document. The purpose is to create nice documents with any software (including fonts and graphics, e.g.) and to generalize them via PHP (filling in DB-content). Let's wait and see, whenever I find something apropriate, I will post it here!

Andreas

Anon

Help - no kidding your url helped!
Finally, a free pdf library! It's not as fast as pdflib - but close enough. I have used two alternative solutions - creating rtf directly (major pain - loooong learning curve to do anything fancy) - and a few active x controls (proprietary format, expensive to licence and IE only). Pdf is really the only viable solution at this time. The browsers will get there eventually (ie's print templates are powerful) - but that isn't "now"...
The documentation is in French, but feed it through Altavista's "babelfish" translator and it's good enough.
I'm starting to work with this library and will keep you informed. So far, it works just fine.

Chris

Anon

Thanks guys for finding this it seems as though we were all looking for the same thing at the same time.

I too have started to look at it but it'd be quite good if we could feedback what we find out 'cause quite honestly my French is sketchy at best so it's gonna take me a while to figure it all out. Unless someone has a french friend to translate of course?

Gra

Anon

So far do good - and my French is practically non-existant! It took about 10 minutes to pump out a page displaying several php variables i.e. a company name and address.

The altavista translation is not bad. Give it the URL and it'll return the entire page translated. Also, the links automatically invoke the translator - so it looks like an English site. The only caveat is the quality of a technical translation. Some are funny, like "police" for "unit" etc. Always refer to the original for syntax and reserved words and you'll be fine. The comments in the class itself are in proper English - so it looks like time to contact and support these developers!

Chris

Anon

Hallo Everybody!

I still think about RTF as an alternative. The main advantage is that you can handle it as a flat file. I already tried the following: designing a form, invoice, customer reply or anything with M$-Word, incl. graphics and all nice things and some placeholders for the stuff you want to insert ({$name}, you can make up your own specification), then save it as RTF. Now open it for reading, put it in a variable and do an eval or replace with eregs to fill in the name for {$name}. When you send this to the browser the client can save, open or print it. I really miss that with PDF and I think there is no PDF-library which allows manipulating existing PDF-docs, is there?

Greetings

Andreas

Anon

Ahhhh - to modify is one thing. Read the fdl for pdf article somewhere in this site. You create a "pdf form" and then supply the data in a separate file. The data from the form description file populates matching fields in the pdf. The only problem is that you have static pdf's where you can really only replace designated areas. You can't make a one page form extend into more pages.
Same thing for rtf...
Now, creating the entire multipage form dynamically gives you total control. Add header, footer, auto page numbers etc and it's not that difficult. Write a function to handle common portions. You can do the same with rtf or pdf - but I found dynamically creating complex rtf was reeeeeeealy tedious.

Anyway, you may want to install the full Adobe Acrobat product and experiment with pdf forms. Btw, you can not only populate these but also post entered data, add java edits etc.

Chris

Anon

Hi!

I found this free class for generating pdf files on the fly:

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

Perhaps this is what you are looking for.

Hope it helps

Jose

Anon

maybe Yaps is useful for you ;-)

http://www.interakt.ro/products/Yaps/index.php

but i haven´t tested it til now....