php|architect January 2006 edition have been just released, as usual this month I didn’t get yet the email notify about the new release but I just saw it online, as today is the 29 of the month, and this month’s issue have been released on 25. This release was about PDFLib’s Block Tool and came also with the release of a new book titled “Beginning PDF Programming with PHP and PDFlib” by Thomas Merz and reviewed by Ilia Alshanetsky.
If you’ve been developing for any length of time, you’ve probably been tasked with to generating PDFs at some point. In this article, an excerpt from Beginning PDF Programming with PHP and PDFlib, Ron Goff discusses the process of combining data from many sources into a single PDF—from installation of the block tool, to creating the blocks in Adobe Acrobat, and then finally working with the blocks via PDFlib.
Since this edition came focusing on PDF, there is another article about FPDI. Most PHP developers have the ability to create PDF documents on the fly, but are they able to build documents from existing templates? PDFLib has supported this through its PDI interface, but the free classes didn’t external documents, until author Jan Slabon released FPDI for FPDF. You may join him in his discussion on how to use FPDI in this article with excellent demos.
I have already made a PDF publishing system for phptunisie.net but I didn’t work with PDFlib or FPDI, this was an excellent article to explore features in these projects and maybe giving more ideas for people interested to develop PDF solutions with PHP.
You can find more about the php|arch january 2006 edition in the mag website.
