At Thu, 27 Mar 2003 10:16:52 +1100, Michael Lake wrote: > Howard Lowndes wrote: > > > > I want to develop an application that uses a background database but > > delivers the displayed data in a web browser. OK, no big deal so far. > > > > The problem is that I also want to be able to deliver printable material > > which will need a degree of formatting to suit a preprinted form. This > > printable material could comprise any number of formatted output sheets to > > be printed as overlays on the preprinted forms. > > > > Given that I want to use a web browser as the main user interface, what > > would be the best language in which to write the app? I'm guessing PHP > > rather than Perl; I see that that has a set of PDF functions that might > > give me what I want. > > I have the same requirement. I am using Perl for the scripting language > and will probably be using PDFLIB > http://www.pdflib.com/ > It also has bindings for PHP > I have tried it out and it can produces very nice small PDF which comes > up quick on a web page.
if the pdf generation is not done from an urgent cgi request (or similar environment), its quite an easy matter to generate some simple LaTeX code and run it through pdfLaTeX. If you're already familiar with LaTeX (or some other TeX variant), then you'll find it much quicker to develop complex layout using the tools already provided by LaTeX. Absolutely fine for offline printing, or generating pdf mail attachments. I'd probably go with something like pdflib for on-the-fly CGI generation though for speed reasons. -- - Gus -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
