Re: Printing invoices

On 21/06/2004, at 9:30 AM, bskolb wrote:

Could someone direct me to a printing solution from a static document that would render variable data elements to be sent to a printer queue? I was thing perhaps of an RTF for the static page, but can't seem to locate any way of inserting the variable data, then spit out each occurrance to a printer.

You could read the contents of an RTF file straight into a PHP variable, then perform some regular expressions on it. You'd have to set-up some naming conventions, but replacing something like {FIRSTNAME} with the contents of $myInvoiceData['FIRSTNAME'] would be pretty basic stuff. I'd probably use preg_replace_callback() with a callback to a function which: a) attempts to match {THIS_BIT} with $myInvoiceData['THIS_BIT'] b) if no match, either - return nothing (it replaces {THIS_BIT} with nothing), or - return {THIS_BIT} (no replacing done -- probably safer for debugging and the mysteries of RTF. c) if there's a match return the value of $myInvoiceData['THIS_BIT'], replacing {THIS_BIT} Let me know if you need more help, but http://php.net/preg_replace_callback should give you enough pointers. --- Justin French http://indent.com.au