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{ Category Archives } PHP

The New Amazon Advertising API

I use Ulrich Mierendorff's aws_signed_request to create my Amazon Wishlist Widget. But Amazon just changed the terms of their API (which they do with frightening regularity). Luckily, it's a small change: each request now requires an Associate Tag in addition to the AWS key and encryption with the AWS secret key. But if you want [...]
2011 11 01 Danny Comments (0)

Fractions and Units in PHP

For the bililite webservices, I kept all the data in what I would call "standard" American medical units, centimeters for height, kilograms for weight, mmHg for blood pressure, mg/dl for bilirubin. But lots of doctors use pounds and inches, and it would be nice to allow those as well. I could have separate data entry [...]
2011 08 11 Danny Medical Informatics Comments (0)

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel, PDF Style

After playing with creating PDFs with PHP using fPDF for a while, and trying to get everything to work consistently, I discovered tcpdf, which is a fork of fpdf that includes everything that anyone has ever added to the original. And I mean everything; this thing is huge! I printed out the source to see [...]
2011 07 12 Danny PDF Comments (0)

Paths, Vector Graphics and PHP images in FPDF

Looking at FPDF and at my PDF tutorial, it is clear that there are a few things that PDF's can do that aren't part of the API of FPDF. However, FPDF is easily extensible to include everything I might find useful, so I put together a package of those routines. See the code. See the [...]
2011 04 11 Danny PDF Comments (0)

Creating PDFs with PHP, part 5: Text

Now we need to add text. That's the most useful part of a PDF, and the easiest. Also the hardest. Sometimes life is like that. See the code.
2011 04 01 Danny PDF Comments (0)

Creating PDFs with PHP, part 4: Images

Now that we can draw in our PDF, we want to add images. There are two kinds of images, bitmapped and vector. In PDF, images are called XObjects (The X stands for external, meaning defined outside the page). Vector images are easier, since they are just packages of PDF drawing commands, a sort of macro. [...]
2011 04 01 Danny PDF Comments (0)

Creating PDFs with PHP, part 3: Drawing

Now that we can create blank PDF's, it's time to add some stuff. Vector drawing commands (lines and shapes) are simple; you just add the commands to the page content stream. In terms of the original class that would be: $this->pages[count($this->pages)-1]->contents .= "the command\n"; // we just need some whitespace at the end, but the [...]
2011 03 31 Danny PDF Comments (0)

Creating PDFs with PHP, part 2: A Blank Page

Continuing my attempt to dissect FDPF to understand PDF's, we'll create the simplest PDF: a blank page. We need a couple of objects: Catalog This serves as the root object and describes the data structures in the document, which for our purposes is just the collection of printed pages. Other things, like the data for [...]
2011 03 24 Danny PDF Comments (0)

Creating PDFs with PHP: Syntax

I wanted to allow my webservices to create PDF files, and I figured it couldn't be too hard—after all, it's just a bunch of graphics commands in a text file, right? Foolish me. The reference manual is 756 pages long, not including the javascript reference, another 692 pages. The place to start is fPDF, which [...]
2011 03 18 Danny PDF Comments (0)

A Search Box for the Website

I've been playing with search engines and for the search API I'm going with Bing; Google limits their free API to 100 queries a day and requires creating a custom search engine. Bing requires signing up and getting an "AppID" but from there it's unlimited. Documentation is, well, Microsoftian: impossible to find and hard to [...]
2011 02 25 Danny Comments (2)