I’m developing a site using PHP and MySQL and there is a requirement to produce reports which will have to be highly formatted (including charts) and printed. I have searched the web and cannot find a solution. I have tried the PEAR Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer module but this only creates simple spreadsheets (no charts), JPGRAPH (have had problems with using this) and looked at using OpenOffice as a background process (I have used this technique before but with VB and Excel). Essentially what we need is a process where the user can make a selection on a WEB page which will result in php interrogate a database, creating a report, converting it to PDF and delivering it to the user. Does anyone know of such a solution?
I am ignorant when it comes to having done any of this myself - but I would suggest you check out one of the php flash libraries available such as ming ( www.php.net/ming) or a VML library for php.
I’ve just begun reading up on this stuff…so I could be way off, but isn’t this what PDFlib does? It looks like you can create PDFs on the fly and position things very accurately, or am I mistaken?
Have a look at this! I have this task on my to do list. This is a PDF creation tool in PHP which describes how to do it. I havnt started on this part of my project yet but I found this useful while I was researching.