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

778 Chapter 32 Generating Personalized Documents in Portable Document Format (PDF)
PDFlib is not free; it requires a commercial license. PDFlib Lite is available as open
source and free, but only under certain conditions such as noncommercial use.
Some free libraries, such as FPDF, are available. FPDF is not as feature rich as the
commercial libraries, however. Also, because FPDF is written in PHP (rather than in C
as a PHP extension), it is a little slower than the other two.You can download FPDF
from http://www.fpdf.org/.
In this chapter, we use PDFlib because it is probably the most commonly used PDFcreation
extension.
You can see whether PDFlib is already installed on your system by checking the output
of the function phpinfo(). Under the heading pdf, you can find out whether
PDFlib support is enabled, as well as the version of PDFlib used.
If you intend to use TIFF or JPEG images in your PDF documents, 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/.
The PDLlib extension is not built into PHP; you must obtain the files from PECL
(PHP Extension Community Library) and install the extension manually.
On non-Windows systems, obtain the extension by downloading the files at
http://pecl.php.net/package/pdflib and installing using the pecl command. Please see
the instructions at http://www.php.net/manual/en/install.pecl.pear.php.
On Windows systems, obtain the precompiled extension (php_pdf.dll) by downloading
the file at http://pecl4win.php.net/ext.php/php_pdflib.dll or by downloading the
entire library of compiled PECL extensions from the PHP.net downloads page. Once
downloaded, place the php_pdflib.dll file in your PHP extensions directory (usually ext
within the PHP installation directory) and add the following line to your php.ini file:
extension=php_pdf.dll
Solution Overview
In this project, you produce a system with three possible outcomes. As you can see in
Figure 32.1, you ask quiz questions, assess the answers, and then generate a certificate in
one of three ways:
n
n
n
An RTF document from a blank template.
A PDF document from a blank template.
A PDF document programmatically via PDFlib.