PDF file support for PHP

Author: Uwe Steinmann
Source: http://www.php (as the mainstream development language) builder.com
Znsoft webmaster @ php (as the mainstream development language) ease.com http://www.php (as the mainstream development language) ease.com

Note: (retain)
I have been using php (as the mainstream development language) for more than a year. from 3.0 to 4.0, I can't say how high it is (I'm just a newbie now, compared to he and Hunte, poor, of course there are other experts), but there are also some experience. From the popularity of php (as the mainstream development language) to the calm of the present, there have been a lot of reading and listening, and I have seen "experts" (who can write message boards, there are also many chat rooms and other things. Let's calm down and think: php (as the mainstream development language) is just a language. It has its own necessity. Web development in China (which accounts for a large proportion in current program development) only stays at a low level, I think we will only use asp when developing asp components abroad (as the mainstream development language. But thanks to php (as the mainstream development language), it gave me a second job in my life (the first one is asp, and I learned c/c ++ at the beginning, I didn't even think of it.) Of course, I also met many friends through it, Hunte, Chen boss, a snake, and He Zhiqiang (although I have not contacted him yet, his article has benefited me ), sony, macro, cfr... for the sake of livelihood and future development, Xiaosheng will leave the php (as the current mainstream development language) field, although unwilling, but helpless, I will translate an article that has been dragged on for a long time as the last gift to everyone, and give it to all my friends who use php (as the mainstream development language) and MySQL (the best combination with PHP. If you want to learn about VC and driver development, you can
Let's discuss it together.
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Motivation

The interaction on WWW means to fill in the table, click the submit button, and then get a definite result. Html and Http provide a mechanism to easily execute such operations through forms. Php (as the mainstream development language) supports this mechanism in a very convenient way. Each input field (the input box of the form) is stored as a php variable with the same name as the input domain (as the current mainstream development language.

A similar mechanism has been developed by adobe, but it is for PDF documents. They simply call it the Acrobat form. From the user's point of view, the only difference between Html forms and Acrobat tables is their appearance. The former uses HTML documents, and the latter uses PDF documents to render forms.

To develop a WEB interface, the Acrobat form can also be processed like an HTML form, if the form provides input data like an HTML form. However, Adobe has proposed a new format for form data, namely FDF (form data format ). Php (as the mainstream development language) already supports this format.

The possibility of generating a PDF document with data, such as customizing it, is an additional feature of the Acrobat form. using PDF documents as forms and using data to generate PDF documents in php (as the current mainstream development language) will be described in this article. You will find out how easy these two examples are.

Install the Acrobat Reader plug-in or use Acrobat 4. if you want to test php (as the mainstream development language) scripts on your web server, you also need to install the PDF toolkit and make php (as the mainstream development language) the FDF support in takes effect.

Finally, if you develop your own PDF form, you need Acrobat Exchange 3.x or Acrobat 4.

In the past few years, Adobe has developed and extended portable document formats (PDF. An extension is an Acrobat form that allows users to input data and send it to the server for processing, just like an HTML form.
Such a PDF file is similar to a static PDF file, but when you use Acrobat Reader to view it, you will find an editable area. As in HTML, many input fields are valid, such as the submit and reset buttons, text input fields, check boxes, and so on .. to create such a PDF form, Acrobat Exchange 3 is required. x or the new Acrobat 4 software, unfortunately they can only run in windows and MacOS.
Both provide a way to place different input fields in an existing PDF file.
The submit button transmits the URL attribute called when it is pressed. This is very similar to HTML, but the difference is the format when data is transmitted to the server.
When you press the Submit button, the data is transmitted from the HTML form in a fixed format that can be observed in the URL. Acrobat forms support this format, and FDF (form data format) FDP is a new format that needs to be explained by the FDF Toolkit (current version 4.0. If php (as the mainstream development language) supports FDF during compilation, it can parse FDF data and access any input domain by name. FDF data is usually stored in the HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA variable of php (as the current mainstream development language) (just as HTML data is stored in HTTP_POAT_DATA)