I want to know if this is possible to print all attached pdf from an object.
(i'm afraid not, but better asking ;D)
context:
User uploads multiple pdf file in his account, then later, he clicks on "print all the pdf attachements", instead of downloading and then one by one clicking on "print"
Thanks.
There are several ways you can go about this with either just JS or a combination of PHP and js (and perhaps server-side programs that can be called by PHP):
Have the target document be a php file which programatically join all the PDFs into a single document (for instance, with pdftk) and then outputs the joined file with PDF headers. This file would be loaded into an iframe which you could call window.print() on with JavaScript.
Use javascript's window.print() function to target several hidden iframes each of which has one of the PDFs loaded in it. The major drawback of this approach is that it will generate multiple print dialogue boxes.
Both of these approaches rely on the user having the necessary settings and plugins to actually load PDFs within the browser window, but if they don't they'll be prompted to download the large file/multiple files.
This can not be done with PHP. Why? Well, PHP is a server-side script. It has no possibilities to access the user's printer.
To my knowledge there is no solution with javascript either. Mike made a good point with the printer dialog being accessible through a javascript command but that is where it stops. This is a good thing though, would you want a page you enter to be able to use your printer without your permission?
Best way is probably to concatenate all the pdf into a single document server side then allow the user to download and print that. This is what manuscriptcentral and probably other online academic peer review systems do.
Related
I want the option of converting HTML to image and showing the result to the user. I would be creating an $html variable with PHP, and instead of displaying using echo $html, I want to display it as an image so the user can save the file if they needed to.
I was hoping there would something as simple as $image = convertHTML2Image($html); :p if that exists?!
Thanks!!
As #Pekka says, the job of turning HTML code into an image is the job of a full-blown web browser.
If you want to do this sort of thing, you therefore need to have a script that does the following:
Opens the page in a browser.
Captures the rendered page from the browser as a graphic.
Outputs that graphic to your user.
Traditionally, this would have been a tough task, because web browsers are typically driven by the user and not easy to automate in this way.
Fortunately, there is now a solution, in the form of PhantomJS.
PhantomJS is a headless browser, designed for exactly this kind of thing -- automated tasks that require a full-blown rendering engine.
It's basically a full browser, but without the user interface. It renders the page content exactly as another browser would (it's based on Webkit, so results are similar to Chrome), and it can be controlled by a script.
As it says on the PhantomJS homepage, one of its target use-cases is for taking screenshots or thumbnail images of websites.
(another good use for it is automated testing of your site, where it is also a great tool)
Hope that helps.
This is not possible in pure PHP.
What you call "converting" is in fact a huge, non-trivial task: the HTML page has to be rendered. To do this in PHP, you'd have to rewrite an entire web browser.
You'll either have to use an external tool (which usually taps into a browser's rendering engine) or a web service (which does the same).
It is possible to convert html to image. However, first you must convert to PDF. see link
You may have a look at dompdf which is a php framework to convert a html file to a pdf.
use WKHTMLTOPDF. works like a charm. it converts to any page to PDF ..
a jpeg can be obtained by performing later operation.
http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/
I am creating an .rtf file based on user submitted form for php web application. Until here it's fine.
Now I need to print this .rtf file on client side default printer silently without any rtf tags in it(print rtf file directly as it is as we have, when we open .rtf in MS-Word).
So is there any script, using javascript or jQuery to do this? Showing the printer dialog also works for me.
Can anyone please suggest me with examples. Thanks in advance.
This would require your script to reach outside of the browser sandbox and script the application to initiate printing, so it can not be done just using javascript and jQuery.
There are few approaches that might work:
First, if you converted the RTF to HTML unsing unoconv, and then called print via javascript, that would allow you to print from the browser, but it would probably include the browser's default headers and footers.
Second, but only for an Intranet application, you could lower the security settings for ActiveX from the Intranet zone, and run Word as an ActiveX control:
var msw = new ActiveXObject("Word.Application");
Third, again for an Intranet, have the server run OpenOffice and print to the network printer nearest the user.
Consider the use case and whether automatic printing adds enough value for the end users to be worth the extra hassle. Most of the things I "print" from the web, I actually just print to PDF and archive to disk, and most print dialog boxes require a few extra mouse clicks before sending the job to the printer anyway.
Currently working on an offshoot of the idea more adequately addressed here.
Creating a Secure File Hosting Server for PDFs
I'm developing a secure PDF hosting website where certain users can download certain PDF's that I have stored outside of the webroot to prevent people from accessing documents they shouldn't access.
I've got the download working using the first solution, but I want to implement a 'view/preview' feature too. I still don't get content headers as well as I should but I believe what is causing the bulk of my issues is I can't put a 'src' attribute on the embed/object/iframe/whatever. And that's kind of the point of the system.
My question is, is there any way to feed a file (as opposed to a url) to an embed/object? I would like to keep my current system and I'm going for simplicity at the moment so the easier the better.
I saw Recommended way to embed PDF in HTML? and will probably check out pdf.js if I'm trying something that isn't doable.
I have not yet had the chance to play with pdf.js, but it either that or a flash player of some sort.
Or you rely on the browser to display it has a webpage and you can iframe it, but that's so lame... it would work only for a fraction of you users.
PDF2SWF - convert PDF to SWF ( 1 page = 1 SWF).
Use other SWF (reader) to load SWF pages via XML or something else.
Use $_SESSION to store ID of PDF document which should be served through e.g. /preview (same link for previewing all documents)
Don't serve original PDF, put a watermark, or make them low-res.
Otherwise, your PDF will never be "secure".
http://www.swftools.org/
Anyone know any Javascript or PHP function to generate PDF and print (printer) automatically.
Excuse my ignorance, I searched on google about it and can not find sufficient documentation.
Many many Thanks Guys
What are you generating your PDF from? I presume that what you want to do is generate a PDF from e.g. a form submission, then print it on the user's computer?
You cannot print from PHP (well there are horrible ways of doing it, but don't) but I doubt it would help you even if you could - it would be printed on the server side, and I imagine you would be wanting to print on the client (i.e. browser) computer.
You can generate PDF's in PHP (have a look at FPDF) and send them to the browser, and you can print a web page in javascript, but to combine the two would be tricky, if it is possible at all. You certainly can't do it without prompting the user.
If you were to generate the PDF, then open it in an iframe, you could maybe call something through javascript to prompt the user with the standard printing options dialog, but that would be as far as it goes. It wouldn't work everywhere, if it worked anywhere, which I somehow doubt.
to create PDFs, theres the great FPDF-library.
printing automatically fortunately isn't possible - just imagine this would be possible and every f***g website could (in addition to the annoying popups and stuff) print out something (advertisements most of the time) on your printer.
EDIT :
if you have control over the clients, you could write a little batch-script like (not tested)
AcroRd32.exe /t %1 printername
and then set pdf-files in your browser to open automatically with this "programm" wich should then print the file without a print-dialogue.
note that you need access to the clients for this and it isn't tested. in theory this works: i did something very similar once to print out labels directly from the browser, but this was a few years ago using WinXP, don't know if this still works on Win7 (or whatever you're using).
I have found some libraries or web services in PHP that does the job. The problem is that the conversion is done when the page is fully loaded, I would like to convert the page to PDF after some content dynamically added via AJAX in onload event.
Thank you very much,
Omar
You could post back document.getElementsByTagName('html')[0].innerHTML to the server (possibly using AJAX) and generate a PDF from that.
When you add content with AJAX, that's only happening on the client's machine, so the server-side PHP conversion code will not work with it. You'll need to come up with a server-side method of including the dynamic content if you want to do the PDF creation on the server.
You could possibly implement an AJAX call that sent the page content/state back to serverside, after the dynamic contens is added, where it could be rendered as a pdf. You might not need all the page, depending on where this "dynamic content" is going to go.
Seems a bit messy, but without knowing the project it's hard to say whether there could be a cleaner method to do what you're trying to do.
This is a client-side requirement due to the Ajax situation. If they're using a Mac they can simply save as PDF but otherwise you have little control over what they can do.
What you can do however for a server-side implementation is keep a record of the page and all their AJAX requests since loading that page, and construct the HTML and PDF on the server from that record if it is requested. Of course this is not a simple task and quite overkill. You'd probably be better off having a different mechanism to create a server-side PDF report of a page other than turning HTML into PDF.
If your page can be updated solely on the client with no trip to the server, you'll have to post back up to your app. That way you'll have all the content and will not have rebuild, which would not be possible if there are client side only interactions.
Wow, thank you everyone I didn't know that this is comunity is so active. To answer Beepcake about the project:
When the page loads the app retrieves, from more than 40 servers, biological information via AJAX request, then a unique view is displayed where you can manipulate the graphic with many options.
So, the cool thing will be to print when the user makes his own version of the graphic. I think that the best solution is to POST the entire HTML with document.getElementsByTagName('html')[0].innerHTML as RoBorg has said and then generate the PDF with a library such as dompdf