I'm generating PDFs dynamically using PHP and PDFlib and some of the fields require text being centered on blank fields lines (like you would see on a paper form). To make sure I have the text field using the maximum width available to me as well as positioned properly I would like to place a temporary border around it so I can see where it is and its size. Unfortunately I do not see any way to do this in the PDFlib manual.
Does anyone know of a tip, trick, or obscure documentation that will allow me to either give these fields a border or some other means of determining their exact size and position?
You can put a showborder=true into the various fit/fill calls' optional parameters argument, and PDFlib will draw a simple solid border around the box:
PDF_fit_textline($handle, 'blah blah blah', $fontsize, $x, $y, 'boxsize={ 50 100 } showborder=true');
Related
I am using the PHP extension FPDF to create PDF documents. I believe I have the margins set to 1" all the way around with justified text, but when I create a PDF document, download it and open it in Acrobat, I see the left margin is 1" but the right margin is about 1.2". I've gone through fpdf.php looking for the issue and cannot find it.
$oPdf = new myPDF('P', 'mm', 'letter');
$oPdf->Open();
$oPdf->SetMargins(25.4,25.4,25.4,25.4);
//set default font/colors
$oPdf->SetFont('Times', '', 12);
$oPdf->SetTextColor(0,0,0);
$oPdf->SetFillColor(255, 255, 255);
//add the page
$oPdf->AddPage();
$oPdf->AliasNbPages();
If I change the top and left margin values, the document reflects the changes. If I change the bottom or right, there is no change. I've seen how the bottom can be changed wth set auto default page break, answered elsewhere. My question is how can I change the right margin and it actually take effect in my document? I have a feeling that this has to do with the measurement of the text when FPDF calculates whether the justified text will fit on the line. I've checked the width of the line and it outputs 165.1 (which is 6.5 inches x 25.4mm) Completely stumped.
Ok, I feel kind of dumb, but hopefully this will help others. I use the FpdfMulticell (See http://www.interpid.eu/fpdf-multicell) for more control over cells and other parts of displaying the content on the PDF document. This is great and all, except for the redundancies that are created. The components of this function require width and height for the cell to be created. This is where the problem was. For some reason I was passing 160 to it rather than 165.1. 6.5" x 25.4 = 165.1. When I go through the references to create the multiCell function within the class, it fixes my problem.
If you're going to use the multicell, I suggest declaring a variable at the beginning of your page such as $pw (i.e., page width) and then instead of passing a constant value, pass the variable. That way your values are uniform and if you want to change it up, then you only have 1 value to change. Make sure you comment so you know what the purpose of that variable is.
$oMulticell = new FpdfMulticell($oPdf);
$pw = 165.1
//Make sure that the content is long enough to go to another line or you won't
//notice the difference with the justified text
$content = "Write some text here Write some text here Write some text here Write some text here Write some text here Write some text here Write some text here Write some text here ";
$oMulticell->multiCell($pw,10,$content,0,"J",1,0,0,0,0);
This works!
I did found a topic similar to this, but I do not know if the solution is the same. So here is my question:
I'm using the GD functions to bild a web card generating program. The thing is that the card's backgound is generating by the $image = imagecreatefrompng(); function.
The card need's also a $cardname as "title" and a $desription as desription. For that I used the imagettftext(); function. But there is a problem, the card's size is 333x485, I need the text to be resized in order to fit in the background without resizing its height, but only the width!
To be more to the point, the $cardname should have width = 240 and height = 34, but if it doesn't fit, it goes off the background, I need a function that will resize its width in order to fit in 240px and leave the height to 34px always!
To understand it more look here: http://yugiohcardmaker.net. in the "name" you can add as much text you like, it will always fit in and in the right width and height!
I'm not going to try and code this as it will take too long, but here's the basic process:
Get the size of the bounding box for your text with imagettfbbox();
Create a new image with imagecreatetruecolor();
Write your text into your new image with imagettftext();
Use imagecopyresampled() to copy the new image with your text to your existing card, setting the parameters to shrink the width but not the height.
Note: the bounding box parameters returned by imagettfbbox()) can be fiddly to work with
You'll also need to be careful about alphablending and background colors to ensure that only your text pixels are copied.
Good luck!
I'm new to tcpdf, creating my first document.
I wonder if there is a way to fit the width of the cell automatically to the content. I currently only see options for fixed size, or taking the whole page width until the end of the line.
I'm aware of GetStringWidth() but having the following problems with it
Why should one bother even for this? Is there a way to just make the cell fit automatically to its contents width?
GetStringWidth() seems to err from time to time, giving shorter results the actual, thus causing the text to be split to the next line. A font is set.
After learning TCPDF more, this is the conclusion:
Cell() and MultiCell() are not intended to be used for just outputting a string and fitting it's length. Instead, Write() and WriteHtml() should be used. Cells exist for the case where you actually want to control the dimentions of the field manually.
Nevertheless, in some cases one may want to compute the width of the cell, such that it takes into account the sizes of the text inside. For this purpose exists GetStringWidth(). (Unfortunately for me it err's from time to time. Maybe I'm not aware of something)
Have an internal "Legacy" application that uses TCPDF to generate a PDF of a checklist. We recently moved from creating a giant string of HTML that described a table, created using the $pdf->writeHTML($myHTMLString); method, to using the MultiCell() methods.
However, we ran into an issue where some text in a description cell would need to run on to a second line, this threw off our layout. As a fix, we created an if block based on 2 variables, one for the string width the other for the actual cell width. (We had 2 instances where the cell width might vary).
If block example:
// Get width of string
$lWidth = $pdf->GetStringWidth(strip_tags($clItem['description']));
// Determine width of cell
$oadWidth = (.01*$width[0])*186;
if ($lWidth < $oadWidth) {
$cHeight = 3.5;
} else {
$cHeight = 7;
}
We then used the variable created by the if block in the MultiCell() like this
$pdf->MultiCell((.01*$width[0])*186, $cHeight, strip_tags($clItem['description']), 1, 'L', 1, 0, '', '', true);
We reused the $cHeight variable for the height params in the other sibling cells so each row of cells had a uniform height. You could most likely reuse this method with any of the other right functions that have a height parameter in TCPDF. Thanks to #shealtiel for the original reference to GetStringWidth()
I have the bounds of a rectangular box.
Is it possible to fit a text (with custom font) into the box while not knowing the text size.
I mean, is there a php function which sets the proper text size so that the text is fitted into the user-defined box?
I do not need text wrapping.
The only functions I found are imagettfbbox and imagettftext.
imagettfbbox does exactly the opposite(gives the bounds, provided a font size) while imagettftext is used to write text on an image, only if fontSize is known.
Are you using php gd? If so, then I would use imagettfbbox. Just define all the parameters except size. Then outside of that loop on size until it is small enough to fit in your defined space. I've done this before. It doesn't do any actual image creative in memory, so it's very fast (much faster than actually creating the image).
for($size=40;$size>5;$size--){
$sizearray=imagettfbbox ( $size , 0- , 'font.ttf' , $message );
$width=$sizearray[0] + $sizearray[4];
if($width<$threshold/*you define*/){
//you've got your $size
break;
}
}
I've run into another problem with GD and PHP.
I'm successfully writing text to an image.
However, I've encountered a case where it would be beneficial to place the text - instead of directly on the image - on a rectangle (or any shape) to create a solid background for the text where the image it's being placed on might not allow the text to be read very easily.
My two ideas are, in order of preference:
Fill the background with the color as it writes the text
Write the text to an appropriately sized image with a solid background, and then overlay the image onto the target
I can't figure out how to do #1 and #2 seems overly complex and I don't know how to determine the dimensions of the text so that I can create a new image for it.
For clarity, here is the output that isn't very good:
And here's how I'd like it to look, with a tight box behind the text of any color:
I'm open to any suggestions, but drawing the color on the fly without any other images or hackiness would obviously be my first choice.
Update:
After #Dan suggested using `imagettftext', I decided that it was high time I added support for that function to my library. Everything is working as would be expected except for one major issue.
The text that's written to the image is still transparent, even when written to a solid background (0 transparency).
Here's a script I wrote to test:
<?php
set_include_path('backbone:global:jquery');
require_once('Image.php');
$scout = new Image();
$scout->source = "scout.jpg";
$result = $scout->Write->Font(25, 25, "A Fairly Long String", 12, "#FF0000", 0, "LiberationSans-Regular.ttf", 1, "#FFFF00", .4, 4);
if( !isset($_GET['dev']) )
{
header("Content-Type: " . $scout->contentType());
}
if( $result )
{
$scout->output();
}
?>
The files I used/required:
1. scout
2. liberation font
3. Image Manipulation Library
- Image
- ImageBase
- ImageCombine
- ImageDraw
- ImageManipulate
- ImageWrite
I apologize about all the files, it really only uses Image, ImageBase, ImageCombine, and ImageWrite, but the others are require_onceed by the loader.
Here's a sample of the output from the script above:
And here's output with zero transparency (fully opaque):
$result = $scout->Write->Font(25, 25, "A Fairly Long String", 12, "#FF0000", 0, "LiberationSans-Regular.ttf", 1, "#FFFF00", 1, 4);
Any ideas what could be causing this? It's EXTREMELY possible that it's my code somewhere, but it seems strange that it would work exactly as I thought it should except for this one bug.
In searching desperately for the answer to this problem, I stumbled upon this SO question that's tangentially related to my problem, and contains the answer.
I've never fully understood why you tell imagealphablending false when you want transparency, so I guess my failure to properly understand the code I'm using has led to this issue.
In any case, the following modified code works like a charm in my one single test case.
To write text to a background without forced 100% transparency for the character boxes, you must turn alpha blending ON while writing the text:
imagealphablending($text->handle, true);
$bool = imagettftext($text->handle, $textSize, $angle, $padding, abs($size[5]) + $padding, $this->AllocateColor($rgba[0]['r'], $rgba[0]['g'], $rgba[0]['b'], $rgba[0]['alpha']), $font, $string);
imagealphablending($text->handle, false);
Maybe this will do the job for you if you switch to ttf. http://php.net/manual/en/function.imagettfbbox.php