Of course others have already told you about Text::PDF, and no doubt you googled the group Yahoo!
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/perl-text-pdf-modules/messages You can do anything you want with PDFs, but the interface is hard to grok and you really need to wrap it. I have a framework that we use to pull info from a database on-the-fly, and generate either Excel spreadsheets, Text dumps or PDFs. It ain't really ready for public primetime. I put out a message about 6 months ago in the PDF list asking if anyone wanted to co-operate with me on getting it ready for realworld. The goal is to be able to create some relatively simple Perl structures and then throw them at a Spreadsheet, PDF, HTML or other rendering engine and reap the rewards! The doc tree used [i.e. Perl structures] leant heavily on the CSS analysis done by the w3 guys on how to organise layout and styles etc in such a way as to be independent of the ultimate rendering environment. Here is the post where I postulate an ideal universe where data is automagically formatted in wondrous tabular PDF prose... http://groups.yahoo.com/group/perl-text-pdf-modules/message/468 mail me direct if you want to help take it further. Regards Jeff -----Original Message----- From: Thomas Eibner [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 08 April 2002 13:47 To: modperl Subject: Re: PDF generation On Mon, Apr 08, 2002 at 01:32:58PM +0200, Patrick wrote: > Few seconds, at least for my cases (and by doing PUSHs to the Web > client it let it know exactly where we are at the generation). Okay, that sounds bareable. > You should also consider, if possible, to generate files in advance > of use. That would have been a possibility if there wasn't such a high impact when you generate the statistics I need. > I also think that should not mess with the PDF output directly. > Because it looks like text, but as you show yourself, it is in fact > more complicated. That is true, but it's a fine line between either having to do ALL the work everytime a layout has to change (try getting any of your graphical designers to make a layout in LaTeX :( ) or "just" parsing a PDF. And since placing content at an absolute position isn't really an option either it's not possible just to import the PDF and then write the information needed to the document. I wonder how much PDI from pdflib.org will do.. -- Thomas Eibner <http://thomas.eibner.dk/> DnsZone <http://dnszone.org/> mod_pointer <http://stderr.net/mod_pointer> <http://photos.eibner.dk/>
