Review: building basic PDF documents using PHP 5 - PHP

As usual with my articles on PHP development, before I move forward and show you how to include multiple lines of text into a given PDF document, I'm going to give you a good review. I want you to recall how to utilize some basic methods included with the “PDFLib” library to build a few simple PDF files.

Below I listed the source code of two examples shown in the first installment of the series. They demonstrate how to create a couple of PDF documents, in A4 and A5 format respectively. Their respective signatures are as follows:

// example creating a basic PDF (A4) document with PHP

try {

// create new instance of the 'PDFlib' class

$pdf=new PDFlib();

// open new PDF file

if(!$pdf->begin_document("","")){

throw new PDFlibException("Error creating PDF document. ".$pdf-
>get_errmsg());

}

  $pdf->set_info("Creator","pdf_example.php");

  $pdf->set_info("Author","Alejandro Gervasio");

  $pdf->set_info("Title","Example on using PHP to create PDF
docs");

  $pdf->begin_page_ext(595,842,"");

    $font=$pdf->load_font("Helvetica-Bold","winansi","");

  $pdf->setfont($font,24.0);

  $pdf->set_text_pos(50,800);

  $pdf->show("PHP is great for creating PDF documents!");

// end page

  $pdf->end_page_ext("");

// end document

  $pdf->end_document("");

// get buffer contents

    $buffer=$pdf->get_buffer();

// get length of buffer

  $len=strlen($buffer);

// display PDF document

  header("Content-type: application/pdf");

  header("Content-Length: $len");

  header("Content-Disposition: inline; filename=example.pdf");

   echo $buffer;

}

catch (PDFlibException $e){

  echo 'Error Number:'.$e->get_errnum()."n";

  echo 'Error Message:'.$e->get_errmsg();

 exit();

}

// example creating a basic A5 PDF document with PHP 5

  try {

// create new instance of the 'PDFlib' class

  $pdf=new PDFlib();

// open new PDF file; insert a file name to create the PDF
document on disk */

   if(!$pdf->begin_document("","")){

throw new PDFlibException("Error creating PDF document. ".$pdf-
>get_errmsg());

}

  $pdf->set_info("Creator","example.php");

  $pdf->set_info("Author","Alejandro Gervasio");

  $pdf->set_info("Title","Example on using PHP to create PDF
docs");

  $pdf->begin_page_ext(421,595,"");

    $font=$pdf->load_font("Helvetica-Bold","winansi","");

  $pdf->setfont($font,24.0);

  $pdf->set_text_pos(50,500);

  $pdf->show("PHP is great for creating PDFs!");

// end page

  $pdf->end_page_ext("");

// end document

  $pdf->end_document("");

// get buffer contents

  $buffer=$pdf->get_buffer();

// get length of buffer

    $len=strlen($buffer);

// display PDF document

  header("Content-type: application/pdf");

  header("Content-Length: $len");

  header("Content-Disposition: inline; filename=example.pdf");

   echo $buffer;

}

catch (PDFlibException $e){

  echo 'Error Number:'.$e->get_errnum()."n";

  echo 'Error Message:'.$e->get_errmsg();

 exit();

}

So far, so good. After looking at the two previous code samples, I’m pretty sure that you now remember the basics of building simple PDF documents that include single lines of text. So now we'll go one step further and see how to create PDF files that display multiple lines.

As you may guess, this interesting process will be discussed in the next section, so click on the link that appears below and keep reading.