Programming PHP

A Simple Example
Let’s start with a simple PDF document. Example 10-1 simply places “Hello world!”
on a page and then displays the resulting PDF document.
Example 10-1. Hello world in PDF
Example 10-1 follows the basic steps involved in creating a PDF document: creating
a new document, setting some metadata for the document, creating a page, and writing
text to the page. Figure 10-1 shows the output of Example 10-1.
Initializing the Document
In Example 10-1, we started by calling pdf_new( ), to create a new PDF data structure,
followed by pdf_open_file( ), to open a new document. pdf_open_file( ) takes
an optional second argument that, when set, specifies the filename to which to write
the PDF data:
pdf_open_file(pdf [, filename ]);
The output of pdf_open_file( ) is sent to stdout if the filename is "-". Ifnofilename
argument is provided, the PDF data is written to a memory buffer, which can later be
fetched by calling pdf_get_buffer( ). The latter approach is the one we used in
Example 10-1.
234 | Chapter 10: PDF
This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition
Copyright © 2002 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.