LiveDocx in PHP

I am delighted to announce that we have just published the following press release for phpLiveDocx:

Bremen, Germany (February 03, 2009) – Traditionally, the generation of professional looking PDF files with PHP has been a tricky programming task: A number of PHP libraries are available, which allow developers to either convert HTML documents to PDF or programmatically generate PDFs from scratch. Business documents created using the former approach are limited by the capabilities of HTML, while it is extremely tedious to get the layout of documents just right, for those, which are generated using the latter approach.

phpLiveDocx offers a solution to both these problems: Templates, which are created in a WYSIWYG environment (such as a standard word processor) are populated with structured data from PHP. The resulting document can be saved as a PDF, DOCX, DOC or RTF file. The concept is the same as with mail-merge.

The benefits to an enterprise are numerous:

• phpLiveDocx separates template and programming logic, thus a graphic designer can produce the template, while a developer can populate it. Additionally, changes to the layout of a template can be made without any changes to the programming logic.

• Using phpLiveDocx, populating a template is simply a matter of assigning a value to a text field. When PDF templates are to be populated using existing solutions, the x and y coordinates of the position at which text should inserted must be specified. It is very time-consuming to calculate these coordinates and in some cases, not possible at all.

• phpLiveDocx is the PHP5 implementation of the SOAP web service LiveDocx. As such, it is not necessary that an administrator install any further software on the server, in order to use phpLiveDocx. The complex word processing and mail-merge processes take place on the backend platform. This not only lowers maintenance costs, but also reduces the hardware requirements of the client web server.

phpLiveDocx has been authored to fit the architecture of the Zend Framework and follows its extreme simplicity philosophy.

To learn more about phpLiveDocx, read the documentation and download a number of runnable sample applications, please take a look at this article.

If you would like to try out phpLiveDocx for yourself, please download the libraries and sample applications.