Programming PHP

Documents and Pages

A PHP document is made up of a number of pages. Each page contains text and/or images. This section shows you how to make a document, create pages in that document, put text onto the pages, and send the pages back to the browser when you’re done.

A Simple Example

Let’s start with a simple PDF document. Example 10-1 simply places “Hello world!” on a page and then displays the resulting PDF document.

Example 10-1. Hello world in PDF

<?php 
 $pdf = pdf_new(  ); 
 pdf_open_file($pdf);
 pdf_set_info($pdf,'Creator','hello.php'); 
 pdf_set_info($pdf,'Author','Rasmus Lerdorf'); 
 pdf_set_info($pdf,'Title','Hello world (PHP)'); 
 pdf_begin_page($pdf,612,792); 

 $font = pdf_findfont($pdf,'Helvetica-Bold','host',0);        
 pdf_setfont($pdf,$font,38.0); 
 pdf_show_xy($pdf,'Hello world!',50,700);

 pdf_end_page($pdf); 
 pdf_set_parameter($pdf, "openaction", "fitpage");
 pdf_close($pdf); 

 $buf = pdf_get_buffer($pdf); 
 $len = strlen($buf);
 header('Content-Type: application/pdf');
 header("Content-Length: $len");
 header('Content-Disposition: inline; filename=hello.pdf');
 echo $buf;
 pdf_delete($pdf);
?>

Example 10-1 follows the basic steps involved in creating a PDF document: creating a new document, setting some metadata for the document, creating a page, and writing text to the page. Figure 10-1 shows the output of Example 10-1.

Figure 10-1. Hello world in a PDF document

Initializing the Document

In