- Regulars:
- Allie
- David
- HJ
- Scot
- Tim
- New Blood:
- Peter K
- Chris S
- Eric H
- Thomas T
- Jonathan T
- Joel
- Fred
- Steve
This month we meet at Dunn Brother's Coffee Shop in downtown Minneapolis. The main topic was PHP and printable documents.
- Tim McGuire gave a demo on using pdflib with PHP. PDFLib generates PDF files on the fly. Pdflib is vector based and not like HTML table cells.
- pdflib is free for personal use. For commercial use, you pay by the number of CPU's your system has: 1 cpu = $500, 2-10 cpu's = $1000, etc.
- PHP generates a pdf file (in memory or on the file system), then the browser renders the file using a local client program like Adobe acrobat reader or xpdf.
- To work with pdf documents in PHP, you must compile PHP using "--with-pdf" and you must have a pdflib library on your system.
- PHPbuilder has a good tutorial on using pdflib with PHP.
- A competing product is Adobe's distiller server. Adobe's pricing info is here.
- Another option is ClibPDF which is "free for private, non-profit use, but a commercial license is required for for-profit applications".
- PHPTriad includes support for pdflib although it might not be the most current version.
Other Misc. topics included:
- Allie gave a tip on creating MS Word or Excel documents on the fly using PHP. The details can be found on the PHPreports site.
- Adding a contributors page to the TCPHP site.
- Where to meet, should internet access be a pre-requisite? Minimally somewhere with a projector was suggested. Possible locations suggested were: high schools, libraries, city halls, the Science Museum, basically anywhere with free meeting space.
- Future topics were suggested. Check out the updated topics page.
Next month's topic: PHP session management and authentication.
