Remote Printing / Building High res images

[ricki]

Hi All

I'm not sure if this should go here or in the echo lounge? anyway. I have been coding with PHP for a couple of years now and have always done serverside only coding (better security, no reliance on clients setup etc etc) and have been very happy. PROBLEM, I have been asked to design a way for users to create, edit and print documents to their printer in High Res, I initially said "sure" thinking its easy BUT... Theory is they select a layout from the server, select image(s) from their own system, place the image(s) using a thumbnail where they want them on the page (within a defined space), put in their text (using their local fonts), then I put together the image and print it directly to their printer without ftp'ing their image onto our server. The constraint of the image remaining on the users system and the high quality printing (not to mention putting the image together) has me stumped as I have always done serverside coding and avoided javascript. Also they want it to run on anything (ie windows, macs, unix systems etc)

If the client side is too complicated I may be able to swing the vote in favor of uploading images to the server can make use of php imagecreate functions to make the file, then what would I pass it to the printer is high res mode (without the need for the user to save it, loading it into some other app and then printing it themselves).

OK, after the novel above, my questions are
1. is this possible?
2. is this practical to do within one month?
3. what is the general technology that I would use to do the client part (ie Javascript, XML-RPC) ??
4. is there a tool that can help me to do this ?
5. should I just say no and point them to one of the $$$ sites that specialise in this kind of thing.

any kicks in the right direction would be appreciated.

thanks
ricki😕

[mouloud2001]

Well. I think it's possible to do that without uploading images. You can use a file input, and use javascript to desactivate it just before submit, just putting the value in a input hidden. So you get the local path of the file, but you don't have uploaded it.
And the you can generate a page with the code for the image.
BUT ! There is a difficulty : Netscape navigator !! (you would guess it ;+)
you must use a tip I don't remember for it, because it don't want to use local file.
You can go to a page I do, in which I found a solution. Look at the code.
Go to www.rezofoto.com, create an account, create an album, and add pictures. The picture appears dynamicly near to the file input, before uploading it. There is a javascript for it wich should work for netscape.
And the other difficulty is : the fonts... I do not have any idea of how you could get the font list of the client...
You could create some common font list, like arial-geneva, and times-georgia, but this is not perfect.

hth

[ricki]

Thankyou for the reply. This is looks like it could be a real headache to get working and be ok under all browsers etc. If anybody else has any input, post away.