Specifications

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There is a free trial option for this service if you want to test it out.

There is also a free ftp-based interface to ps2pdf at the Net Distillery:

http://www.babinszki.com/distiller/

Software to Create PDF Programmatically

Support for creating PDF documents is available from within PHP. Two different function

libraries are available, with similar intentions. As they rely on external libraries, neither is

compiled in to PHP by default.

PHP’s PDFlib functions use the PDFlib library, available from

http://www.pdflib.com

The ClibPDF functions use the ClibPDF library, available from

http://www.fastio.com/

Both these libraries are similar. They provide an API of functions to generate a PDF document.

We have elected to use PDFlib because it seems to be updated and maintained more regularly.

It is worth noting that neither of these libraries are Free Software. Both permit some non-

commercial use without charge, but require a license fee if you intend to provide a commercial

service using them.

You can see if PDFlib is already installed on your system by checking the output of the func-

tion phpinfo(). Under the heading pdf, you can find out if PDFlib support is enabled, as well

as the version of PDFlib used.

In order to install PDFlib, you will also need to install the TIFF library, available from

http://www.libtiff.org/

and the JPEG library, available from

ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/

On a UNIX system, these pieces of software are installed in the usual way, using configure

and make. You will need to recompile PHP with the switch --with-pdflib.

On a Windows server, the easiest way to get PDFlib support is to download one of the unoffi-

cial precompiled binaries available on the Web. To test the code from this chapter on a

Windows machine, we got a precompiled binary from

http://php.weblogs.com/easywindows

Another popular build is available from

http://www.php4win.de

Generating Personalized Documents in Portable Document Format (PDF)

HAPTER 30

GENERATING

PERSONALIZED

DOCUMENTS IN

PDF

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