HELP, Find PHP code for Directly print pdf

narunaru

I'm a newbie on php, and I've a project using it,

I am creating a form that generate value to fill pdf form that I created using acrobat.
I use this resource
http://koivi.com/fill-pdf-form-fields/

And it works well on me, but I need to make the fdf file automatically printed when the fdf has been save.
I have searched on internet and find that it is impossible to print it directly using php,
and also there are some ways like using software that installed on server and client side,
but for installing software to both side like that is impossible for my project,,

Are the some simple or easier way to directly print the fdf?

Thanks :-)

johanafm

narunaru;11007113 wrote:
I have searched on internet and find that it is impossible to print it directly

Don't believe everything you read.

[man]printer[/man] documentation if you're running PHP on Windows.

If you're running PHP on *NIX there are other ways. A web search for "php print pdf" yields http://www.nongnu.org/phpprintipp/ which is a class to handle IPP.

Another way would be

shell_exec("lpr filename.pdf");

which is one of the first results when searching for "php printer" (which is also how I found the Windows extension mentioned above).

But it's an FDF, not a PDF!
Well, while I've no idea what the FDF format looks like, I'm rather certain that (if it's even needed) FDFs can be saved as PDFs. I'd also suspect that an FDF is printable, with the difference from sending it to screen obviously beeing that you can't fill it out on paper and then save the updated information on the computer again. But once filled out on screen, you can most likely use lpr to print the filled out FDF. It's the first thing I'd try anyway.

narunaru

thanks for the reply,,

I'll try what you suggest me to :-)

Actually there are some code for converting fdf to pdf, but I still face some error on it,

johanafm

Did some reading about FDF. Apparently it just saves the input data, along with some other stuff. There are tools (in one of the other top recent threads) that converts FDF to PDF.

If you allready have code to generate PDFs, exctracting the data from an FDF is very simple. Just open it up and you'll see what it looks like. All user data, along with form field names are between [ and ]. There are /flag indicators with one upper case letter flags that tells you what data type you're dealing with which makes it easy to parse the string.