Customising a PDF file?

Cinquecento

My client (a printer) needs to have a system where his client can enter business card details and is then displayed a PDF proof of their entry on the actual card artwork - he'll then use this as the actual artwork to print from.

The business cards have been designed in Quark Xpress - though presumably they get converted to PDF before getting 'customised' with name/position/phone etc...

So - how do I do this in PHP? Any tutorials?

thanks

Ian

theeper

Take a look at Forms Data Functions

http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.fdf.php

jeremuck

I was trying to do somethign similar, I think.
You have a pdf "template" type of thing and you want to modify it using PHP?

I looked for days. I discovered that you really can't modify a PDF. You can create new ones using PHP. But I don't think you can modify it as if a template.
For example, you can't search for a string "Name" and replace it with whatever text you want. It has to do with the way the file is structured, evidently it doesn't have any kind of object model, it's just a bunch of drawing commands.

If you don't believe me, try looking on sourceforge.com. There are PDF libraries for PHP, but I couldn't find ANY that let me modify an existing pdf.

There are other file formats that are better for this type of activity.

Goodluck...

bastien

www.fpdf.org

Cinquecento

It turns out that there is already a system that does just this...

The artwork is output as a PDF and then a series of HTML form fields supply content for the variable data...

I'm not sure what has to be done to the PDF to get it to 'encapsulate' the form data, but I'll try to find out when I get sent the code.

Trouble is it's all done in (dare I mention it) PERL!

YUK! (I don't know PERL)

Ian

jeremuck

sigh I already worked out an alternative.
I would like to see it though.