Pear File_PDF instructions

perpetualshaun

We installed the Pear package as we did the Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer. But while the Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer comes w/ excellent documentation on the Pear site w/ simple, step-by-step instructions of how to call and use the class, I can't seem to find anything for the File_PDF package.

I've tried several different Google searches and can't seem to find anything that way either. Does anyone out there know how to use this? Know of some online help I can refer to??

Thanks,
Shaun

Valdhor

I have no idea about the PEAR package but I have had good luck with TCPDF http://www.tecnick.com/public/code/cp_dpage.php?aiocp_dp=tcpdf

NogDog

I can't offer any help, but the fact that the latest release is "0.3.1 (beta)" would both give some explanation as to why there's not a lot of end-user documentation yet and also give one second thoughts about using this as part of a production system.

perpetualshaun

Thanks for your input! I downloaded the TCPDF files and it does indeed seem to be very easy to use, on the surface. I'm having some trouble getting it to output some HTML though. I have a very simple report for a client w/ some paragraph and heading tags in it. I looked at the test_unicode.php file that came w/ the package and thought I'd simply be able to plug my HTML right in. But it outputs a PDF w/ all the <> tags still in it.

I created a copy of that test_unicode.php file and stripped out everything but the basic HTML on the first page and it works just fine. But when I try to run another file titled 'test_report.php' it does the exact same thing; outputs it w/ the <> still in it. But when I compare the documents in BB Edit they are identical. How can that happen??

Any tips for getting the writeHTML to work?

Thanks,
Shaun

Valdhor

No tips needed - it works great for me.

Could you post your 'test_report.php'.

BTW - TCPDF is derived from FPDF so I used the tutorials there to learn how to create pages with TCPDF.

perpetualshaun

Oy... in the end it was a ’ character that was messing me up. Just one thing that truly appears to not be working. It's outputting extra line breaks between all my paragraphs on the PDF even though I have that variable set to 'false' like this:

$pdf->writeHTML($htmlcontent, false, 0);

How can I get rid of all this extra space? I did a search through the FPDF site but didn't seem to fine anything.

Valdhor

Do you have an extra carriage return (\r or \n) or an extra <BR> ?

Do you have well formed paragraphs (<p> ends with </p> ?

I did not come across this problem in my (Admittedly limited) use (I was outputting table data).