PHP and MySQL Web Development 4th Ed-tqw-_darksiderg

776 Chapter 32 Generating Personalized Documents in Portable Document Format (PDF)
Solution Components
To get the system working, you need to be able to examine users’ knowledge and
(assuming that they pass your test) generate a certificate reporting their performance. For
this project, you experiment with generating this certificate in three different ways: using
an RTF template, using a PDF template, and creating a new PDF programmatically.
Let’s look at the requirements of each of these components in some detail.
Question and Answer System
Providing a flexible system for online assessment that allows a variety of different question
types, various media types for supporting information, useful feedback on wrong
answers, and clever statistic gathering and reporting would be a complex task on its own.
In this chapter, we are mainly interested in the challenge of generating customized
documents for delivery over the Web, so we explain how to build only a very simple
quiz system.The quiz does not rely on any special software. It uses an HTML form to
ask questions and a PHP script to process the answers.You have been doing this since
Chapter 1,“PHP Crash Course.”
Document Generation Software
No additional software is needed on the Web server to generate RTF or PDF documents
from templates, but you need software to create the templates.To use the PHP PDF creation
functions, you need to have compiled PDF support into PHP, a topic which is discussed
later in this section.
Software to Create RTF Template
You can use the word processor of your choice to generate RTF files.We used Microsoft
Word to create our certificate template, which is included on the CD-ROM in the
Chapter 32 directory.
If you prefer another word processor, it would still be a good idea to test the output
in Word because the majority of your visitors will be using this software.
Software to Create PDF Template
PDF documents are a little more difficult to generate.The easiest way is to purchase
Adobe Acrobat.This software allows you to create high-quality PDFs from various applications.We
used Acrobat to create the template file for this project.
To create the file, we used Microsoft Word to design a document. One of the tools in
the Acrobat package is Adobe Distiller.Within Distiller, we needed to select a few nondefault
options.The file must be stored in ASCII format, and compression needs to be
turned off. After these options are set, creating a PDF file is as easy as printing.
You can find out more about Acrobat at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/.
You can either buy it online or from a regular software retailer.
Another option to create PDFs is the conversion program ps2pdf, which, as the name
suggests, converts PostScript files into PDF files.This option has the advantage of being