Re: Printing Question

On Sat, 2008-01-26 at 15:19 +0100, Floor Terra wrote: > On Jan 26, 2008 1:03 PM, Peter Jackson <tasmaniac@iprimus.com.au> wrote: > > > Whats the best way to do formatted printing via php? > > You could try PDFlib(). > Draw your reports to landscape formated pdf's and print them. > > > Oh and I'm aiming for a unix/windows outcome. > > pdf is platform independent. > > I hope this is what you meant. I recently had a request from a client to create a button on client search results that would generate page that could print off a mailing envelope for each selected client. They wanted to run a print batch on a couple of thousand clients. So I used HTML, CSS. Specifically to force page breaks while printing I used the following: <div style="page-break-after: always"></div> Note that you can't use a span for the above css attribute. Then for various dimensions of the envelope and return address etc, I used CSS attributes defined by the inches unit. I'll admint I whipped it up quick and dirty using tables (sorry, tables are just simpler for generating quick layouts than divs are... talk to the hand smelly purists :) So something like the following: table.envelopeLayout { width: 13in; } table.envelopeLayout td.returnAddress { height: 3in; } So this looked nice in the browser, but when they went to print it got all borked when they told IE to use landscape mode. So I told them to upgrade to a real browser (Firefox (though I prefer Opera :)). After that they told me it worked perfectly. So, to make the point... you do't need PDF, HTML will do. BTW, I did this all remotely and someone on-site did a couple of print tests to give me feedback. I never even got to see their new fancy schmancy printer :) I've done other print stuff via the browser before too... such as state driving certificates for presentation in court. Never had a problem once the layout and print configuration were refined. Cheers, Rob. -- .------------------------------------------------------------. | InterJinn Application Framework - http://www.interjinn.com | :------------------------------------------------------------: | An application and templating framework for PHP. Boasting | | a powerful, scalable system for accessing system services | | such as forms, properties, sessions, and caches. InterJinn | | also provides an extremely flexible architecture for | | creating re-usable components quickly and easily. | `------------------------------------------------------------'