[RESOLVED] personalise a certificate to print

rikmoncur

Thanx if anyone can help me with this. (Searched but came up with nothing.)

The scene: After doing a small test on a website, a student is awarded a ceritificate of merit with their name on it. So there would be a link to 'print your award certificate here'.

It would have to be read only so it couldn't be shared with folks who haven't done the test.

But how would I do this?
I have the image of the certificate as a jpg (or gif).
The easiest way I thought was just a watermarked MSWord document with an editable name - but that's not read only.

Can I do it with an image (GD library) or perhaps create a PDF or some other way?

Any pointers, tutorials etc much appreciated.

leatherback

hi,

Note that PDF is not read-only, even when secured. A lot of software is available that will crack a PDF, if security is a real concern.

You could look at images (e.g., see here an idea obout tyling text: http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/cash20030526.php3?page=3), and have a browse through the other colums.

To make it more secure: Please the base-images in a inaccesable folder on the server, and use php to read the file into memory, spit it out on-the-fly when needed.

rikmoncur

Thanx for the info Leatherback, I'll have a look at that.
Security's not really an issue - it's not vital stuff.

It's just occurred to me that I could just have a normal high resolution jpg as table background on a webpage and try and create on top of that a non-editable name as an image with GD Library?

leatherback

Yeah, the name-on-top would be fairly easy to do with GD, once you have decided where it should go. Then spit the image out to the webpage, so the user can print it.
Set some headers to no-caching, expire=-1 etcetc.

rikmoncur

Good stuff - I'll have a pop at that and I'll post the results here.

UPDATE:

Browsers really don't like printing backgrounds, do they!?

Anyway, what I've done is simply put the image on the webpage and put a layer on top of that which will echo the user's name from a database.
That will then print ok and the users aren't really expected to be savvy or devious enough to bung copies to their cronies so that's ok too.

B_man

There is a chance that some browsers may not get it quite right. If you want to be sure then GD's the way to go. Doing something simple like adding text is easy in GD, and just involves uploading the TTF font you want to use to the webspace, loading the certificate image into a var, loading the font into another var, and using a text function to add the text, then outputting it with imagepng/jpeg.