Allowing users to edit and export a pdf

CaldwellYSR

Member
So at Krymson we have gotten ourselves into a rather sticky predicament. We have a client that's starting a magazine for a particular niche. What he wants is for his users to be able to come in and add their own content to these little magazines. Every magazine would have the same format, advertisements and things like that. The difference would be each user could fill in their own content to populate the magazine. He also wants the magazines to be exported as pdf's so the users can print the magazines themselves.

Anyways I have looked at FPDF and a few things like it but I really don't see that being a plausible solution unless I can make a class that sets the basic layout and then just adds content from an html form. Possible but alot of work and alot of room for error once content starts getting added.

Another idea we've had is to again make a form and instead of using a class like that we could load a web page using the content from the form and the layout he wants. Then the users could simply print the web page.

Does anyone have a thought as to which of these might be better/easier to our cause or maybe a suggestion of some profound way we haven't thought of to make this happen?
 

Phreaddee

Super Moderator
Staff member
Haha, ive just finished a project similar to that...
I used a form, with the results styled in a print css.
Used firefox to print to pdf.
Js to switch between the appropriate messages.
Lot of work but worth it in the end.
Yes much room for error!
 

CaldwellYSR

Member
Haha, ive just finished a project similar to that...
I used a form, with the results styled in a print css.
Used firefox to print to pdf.
Js to switch between the appropriate messages.
Lot of work but worth it in the end.
Yes much room for error!

Phreaddee you's a bad mamajama you know that? 16 minutes and I got me an answer :p Thanks for this, I didn't know ff let you print to pdf.
 

Phreaddee

Super Moderator
Staff member
In the end we chose ff because it did css3 columns (when printed) whilst safari + chrome didnt.
Tho @fontface didnt work for ff print either so we settled on typekit.
It seemed to handle paged media with some success too.
 

leroy30

New Member
What about iText / iTextSharp?

There's an HTML parser you can use to generate PDFS from HTML that you might be able to utilise. i.e. Use some fancy query to make some really nice HTML designer, allow the user to make changes then run the method that converts the HTML to a PDF and Whoala!

I've only used the HTML to PDF side of it in simple scenarios normally I generate the PDFs by hand so I'm not 100% if it's what you're after but it's free is worth taking a look.

Sounds like a reasonably ambitious project. Good luck!
 

chrishirst

Well-Known Member
Staff member
FireFox doesn't have PDF printing as a native function, so your users will need something like PrimoPDF installed on the local machine, which installs as a printer so will work in ANY browser.
 
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