pdflatex inside php

Anon

Greetings,

I'm trying to create a pdf document from inside a PHP script. Currently, a user inputs text, this text is written out to a file letter.tex in proper LaTeX syntax.

At this point, i'd like to compile the program the source into pdf using the 'pdflatex' command. Unfortunately, when I run

passthru("pdflatex letter.tex");

system("pdflatex letter.tex");

from inside the script I get the error:

This is TeX, Version 3.14159 (Web2C 7.3.1) ! I can't write on file `proletter.log'. Please type another transcript file name: ! Emergency stop No pages of output.

The problem isn't permissions: the folder that i'm working in is world writeable and owned by apache.apache. I'm new to PHP...am I missing something? Has anyone done something similar to this? Thanks for your help!!

Anon

Hey,

I'm a moron: if the script is in

/var/www/html/latex

and the letter you want to compile is in

/var/www/html/latex/public_letter

then pdflatex invoked from the script will attempt to write its logs and such to the

/var/www/html/latex directory

and not the

/var/www/html/latex/public_letter

directory where I had expected.