Is Zend_Pdf going to be improved shortly?

krubach · #1 (**permalink**) 10-10-2008, 12:03 PM

Heya guys,

I just wanted to ask if Zend_Pdf is going to be improved in a short term.
I think it lack a very important thing, that i've read, was going to be implemented (some post from a looooooooong time ago).
The use of paragraphs/text boxes, with the possibility to align text.

I mean, for reporting, Zend_Pdf is nearly useless to me.
I don't need to draw circles, and stars and other supported/useless features.
I just want to grab a template text, replace a few strings and put it there nicely wrapped and aligned.

You are probably going to tell me: "use the string length calculation posted <here>", but a framework is supposed to ease things, not to make us use workarounds.

Any news on this?

Thank you.

krubach · #2 (**permalink**) 10-11-2008, 11:55 PM

Wow... almost 120 views and no replies.

You can get two conclusions:
1 - No one knows it
2 - There are manny people interested in these improvements.

jweber · #3 (**permalink**) 10-16-2008, 04:42 AM

I agree. I'd love easy "export to PDF" functionality. With every ZF release I check Zend_Pdf to see if it's there yet.

Highland · #4 (**permalink**) 10-17-2008, 06:15 PM

I still use HTMLDOC to make my PDFs. Much messier (have to use passthru() ) but I don't have to change anything to make it work. Oh, and you kinda need to have root access to install the program since it's all CLI.

Still, Zend_PDF seems to have potential log run.

krubach · #5 (**permalink**) 10-17-2008, 11:43 PM

Ok.

A little update on this.
During my quest about Zend_Pdf I found out this thread:
Nabble - Zend MFS - Upcoming Zend_Pdf Enhancements

It seemed that my prayers were going to get an answer, but, the thread was old and i couldn't find any update about these new features, so i decided to contact Willie (one of the devs) to check on the status of this.

Willie replyed promptly and here's what he said to me (quoted only relevent parts...):

Quote:

Thanks for the inquiry. The code is still alive, but exists in a different form. Over the summer, our changes became much more comprehensive than we had anticipated. So much so, in fact, that we ended up breaking backwards-compatibility in several areas; the project has evolved into an almost complete rewrite.

Due to the BC breaks, the code would have become Zend_Pdf in the Zend Framework 2.0 release. However, that release is still at least a year away, and Zend has not committed to any release timeline. We didn't want the code to languish in the Incubator forever, so we have decided to release it independently for now.

You can find the code at our web site: RE Framework - Home Unfortunately, I don't have the developer documentation finished, but the API documentation is complete. There is a trivial "Hello World!" example on the site. I'm working on additional code samples and hope to have them posted soon.

We're calling it a 0.1 preview release, but the code is quite functional, and is in production use on a few different web sites now. The text layout API is about 70% done, so many of the advanced features are not available yet, but the line-wrapping and alignment capability you mentioned are in place now as long as you use the drawText() method shown in the Hello World example.

(...) there will be updates forthcoming. We don't have any release dates at this point, but as new features are added, we will be continually updating the unstable branch in our Subversion repository.

Please download the code and give it a try.
(...)

So, while we wait these improvements to be released under the Zend Framework, we can beta test it.

I still haven't give it a try, but will do so soon.

Hope this helps you guys too.

And thumbs up for Willie and Kevin.

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