One of the nice things about PHP has to be its support for awide variety of different technologies. And one of the most overlookedextensions in PHP 4 is the PDFLib extension, which allows you todynamically construct PDF documents through your PHP scripts. Find outmore, inside.
In order to use PHP's PDF manipulation capabilities, you need to have the PDFLib library installed on your system. If you're working on Linux, you can download a copy from http://www.pdflib.com/ and compile it for your box. If you're running Windows, your job is even simpler - a pre-built PDF library is bundled with your distribution, and all you need to do is activate it by uncommenting the appropriate lines in your PHP configuration file.
Additionally, you'll need a copy of the (free!) Adobe Acrobat PDF reader, so that you can view the documents created via the PDFLib library. You can download a copy of this reader from http://www.adobe.com/
Once you've got everything in place, it's time to create a simple PDF file. Here goes:
<?php
// create handle for new PDF document
$pdf = pdf_new();
// open a file
pdf_open_file($pdf, "philosophy.pdf");
// start a new page (A4)
pdf_begin_page($pdf, 595, 842);
// get and use a font object
$arial = pdf_findfont($pdf, "Arial", "host", 1); pdf_setfont($pdf, $arial, 10);
// print text
pdf_show_xy($pdf, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,",50, 750);
pdf_show_xy($pdf, "than are dreamt of in your philosophy", 50,730);
// end page
pdf_end_page($pdf);
// close and save file
pdf_close($pdf);
?>
Save this file, and then browse to it through your Web
browser. PHP will execute the script, and a new PDF file will be created and stored in the location specified at the top of the script. Here's what you'll see when you open the file:
/ 113 
