Does anyone know of a good tutorial for PHP COM programming

[Gordoweb33]

Hi all,
I was wondering if any of you have had any luck finding any good tutorials on using PHP and COM with MS Office and Adobe Acrobat? My problem is this, I am writing a program that requires the printing of government forms, both placing the data on a preprinted form and also for laser reproducing the forms from scratch. Quite frankly a web browser does not provide useful results as these forms are official and the government agencies receiving them are very much sticklers for detail. As such I was thinking that it might be easier to print these forms properly and more accurately through either MS Word or Adobe Acrobat using COM to place my data as necessary.

More or less these forms will be held up to the light with a blank form beneath them to see if they match close enough. We already have a different version of our software working through word, so any help leading to a tutorial on PHP COM programming would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks everyone.
Gord.

 

[pain4u]

COM is totally different than PHP and alot more complex. The books I like are SAMS check them out @

http://www.samspublishing.com

What I would suggest doing is making a printer friendly version of the form from the web browser, if you do it right...you should have no problem inserting the data into the correct fields and letting the web browser ouput the image/form properly...there are ways to set it up for print using CMYK, but first try it like this:

It really depends on the form, hard to tell with this little of info. But, if you have a scanned image of the form. You can probably cut it up and set each area that requires text into the background of an html table cell (setting the width & height correctly and inserting transparent spacers). THEN allow PHP to write the data out...it would all have to be dynamic. Meaning that php will have to output the html code entirely dynamic as an phtml file.

HOPE THIS HELPED! - PAINKILLER

 

[MrSandman666]

CSS could help. It let's you set absolute positions of HTML Elements, so if you have the scanned image, Display it and set the positions of your PHP output via CSS to match the form. Should be rather easy.

 

[Gordoweb33]

Thanks for the help. I was thinking CSS would be a nice way to go about it and using the scanned image of the form as a background, I just wasn't sure how effective it would be. The forms are full page, 8.5x11. Heck with it, wanted to spare everyone the gorey details, but what I need is to be able to print death certificates and here is the whole scenario.

Some states and provinces in Canada allow the complete laser reproduction of the form from scratch, while others, New York for example will not allow this reproduction of the form. As such we need to simply place the data on the form that is preprinted and comes off of a pad of forms. More or less the state or provincial registrar at the bureau of vital statistics will likely hold the form up to a blank original with a light in the background to see if it matches.

Thanks,
Gord.