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

796 Chapter 32 Generating Personalized Documents in Portable Document Format (PDF)
After you have finished the whole PDF document, you need to close it by using
pdf_close(). When you are generating a file, you also need to close the file.
The line
pdf_close($pdf);
completes the generation of the Hello World document.
Now you can send the completed PDF to the browser:
$data = pdf_get_buffer($pdf);
// generate the headers to help a browser choose the correct application
header('Content-Type: application/pdf');
header('Content-Disposition: inline; filename=testpdf.pdf');
header('Content-Length: ' . strlen($data));
// output PDF
echo $data;
You could also write this data to disk if you preferred. PDFlib allows you to do this by
passing a filename as the second parameter to pdf_open_file().
Note that some PDFlib function parameters that are documented in the PHP manual
as being optional are required in some versions of PDFlib.The document for the certificate
is more complicated, including a border, a vector image, and a bitmap image.With
the other two techniques, you can add these features using a word processor.With
PDFlib, you must add them manually.
Generating a Certificate with PDFlib
To use PDFlib, we chose to make some compromises for this project. Although it is
almost certainly possible to exactly duplicate the certificate used previously, a lot more
effort would be required to generate and position each element manually rather than use
a tool such as Microsoft Word to help lay out the document.
We want to use the same text as before, including the red rosette and the bitmap signature,
but we are not going to try to duplicate the complex border.The complete code
for this script is shown in Listing 32.6.
Listing 32.6
pdflib.php— Generating a Certificate Using PDFlib