PDF vs Word

Anon

What is easier to do

Generate PDF on the the fly with PHP

Generate MS Word Docs on the fly with PHP

I have an intranet application where I need to print out documents, my problem is that HTML is really shitty for printing because of Page break problems, so I need to dymanically some how generate a PDF or Word file, note I will also have to include images into the word documents so this will also be a consideration in choosing wich format to generate

I hope some one out there has done this and can help me, thanks

[deleted]

Either will work ofcourse, but the PDF-Lib is probably a lot cheaper than the word-convertion tools.

But with PDF you will have to make the documents by hand through PHP whereas a word doc utility would probably have some sort of one-size-fits-all converter that tries to make the best of your html (never doing exactly what you want)

Plus, PDF is much smaller than word and more portable.

But, if you take care of how long and wide your documents are, the html versions are quite printable...

Anon

Do you have a suggestion on how to make HTML print without the page break problem?

The documents are variable in length, they could be 100 words to 65,000 words, I have already paginated the document with html to look good however when I print I get page break problems, any sugestions?

Thanks

Also do you know how to install the pdflib with windows as a module, I have read the documentation and it does not seem to work

Thanks

lucianoes

I don't know if it matters to you, but it does to me so I'll say it anyway. I am a professional translator and PDF is every translator's second worst nightmare. The first would be DTP. Extracting the text from those bad boys for pre-processing and translation is extremely annoying, it takes us a lot more time to finish any job, many of us are so very prone to charging more for translating a PDF file than for an MS Word file.

Summing up, if there's any chance those documents will ever have to be translated and you have a chance to crank DOCs instead of PDFs, please do.

Please. I'm begging you.

Luciano ES
Santos, SP - Brasil

Anon

generate PDFs with this:

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

the ezpdf class will very easily let you create muliple page documents with page controls, etc. its awesome.