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How do you create the PDF of the ward directory?
Posted: Mon Sep 29, 2014 9:48 am
by mesmith
My boss wants to create a website that will create a PDF (printable) copy of some of the data. I know that church does exactly what I want to do in the printing of the ward directory. I have searched the internet and find a lot of information but none of it seems to relate directly to what the church is doing, which is what I want to do. So, my question is
What technology do you use to create the server side PDF that the user can then print on the client side?
Thank you in advance.
Re: How do you create the PDF of the ward directory?
Posted: Mon Sep 29, 2014 10:36 am
by jdlessley
The PDF is created in part using an API, or more than one APIs, to access the data from the Church servers. The distribution of APIs is limited to officially sanctioned projects.
Re: How do you create the PDF of the ward directory?
Posted: Mon Sep 29, 2014 10:53 am
by mesmith
jdlessley wrote:The PDF is created in part using an API, or more than one APIs, to access the data from the Church servers. The distribution of APIs is limited to officially sanctioned projects.
So, this is a custom solution to create the PDF?
I was hoping that you are using an off-the-shelf API to create the PDF that can be purchased by anyone.
Okay, back to the drawing board.
Re: How do you create the PDF of the ward directory?
Posted: Mon Sep 29, 2014 11:43 am
by russellhltn
I think JD thought you were wanting to make a PDF of church data, not just an understanding of the technology behind the process.
Re: How do you create the PDF of the ward directory?
Posted: Mon Sep 29, 2014 1:00 pm
by mesmith
russellhltn wrote:I think JD thought you were wanting to make a PDF of church data, not just an understanding of the technology behind the process.
You are correct. I am looking for instruction in the methodology of how one would do this. I did find a white paper that described using a PDF library combined with a LaTeX library to produce a PDF for consistent printing.
I am still looking for ideas if anyone has any.
Re: How do you create the PDF of the ward directory?
Posted: Mon Sep 29, 2014 2:55 pm
by jonesrk
http://wkhtmltopdf.org/ is one tool that you can use in your code to do this.
Re: How do you create the PDF of the ward directory?
Posted: Tue Sep 30, 2014 9:09 am
by mesmith
Thank you. This one I liked. I played with it for a short time and it looks like it works great.
Note to other readers:
This solution provides a precompiled binary that will work on windows. You will have to download the source and compile it on any other platform (Linux, Mac) you may want to use.