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Kevin_Isley

Hi everyone,

I am needing to use some sort of web page to print out a bunch of different reports using PHP/MySQL. Now, I know how to get the data out of the database with PHP, and I even know how the get the correct data out.

What I don't know what to do about is, what it should display in, ... my first thought would be Microsoft Word ... but it will be running off of a Linux box, so thats out.

So, I can only think of two other alternatives. Using PHP to create a .PDF file, or using CSS.

Does anyone have a good idea of what would be best, and if so can someone direct either by responding to the post, or by responding with a website for me to look at. Remember this will have to print out reports, and also mailing labels. Please help!!

Thanks,

Kevin

swr

If you need dead-tree output, and you need to reliably control what gets put where on those dead trees, PDF is the right choice.

With CSS you are at the mercy of the browser, and with Word you are at the mercy of whatever version of Word the file gets opened with. Which is why PDF is at all popular in the first place.

leatherback

Hi,

On the other hand.. If this output printing is to be done by you/within your office, and you can be fairly sure the users are going to have acces to newer versions of browsers you should not have big problems using CSS for printing & layout. (I generally am facing less then 5px differences in object locations between IE / NS / opera on windows)

greg252

If you just need to generate reports and like to use word, try Open Office (for linux). You can export the data as comma delimited and import into OO as needed.
Great software and FREE.

OR...
you can grab all of the data you need and use GD to generate charts. If you look around this site, you'll find a lot of resources for this.

Good luck.

weekender

or you can use COM objects to put the data straight into a MS Word document. That would be flash...

i think the idea is you create a doc with fields, then php connects through COM to the doc and places your text into the field placeholders.

CSS is probably the simplest tho - and there's no reason why it shouldn't layout accurately. You can use cm measurements in css, so should be good.