Friday, 2 March 2007

Know About PDML, a PHP Library

A post over the LoopPo blog informs you about the Portable Document Markup Language (PDML) library. It further says that it is a library to output PDF using PHP and HTML-like markup language. The ‘getting started’ page describes how to use it. The author explains that in order to install the library, create a PHP file starting with and start outputting PDML. The PDML will be converted to a PDF file using the FPDF class, the author explains.

The author says if you look at the end of pdml.php you can notice a call to ob_start( ‘ob_pdml’), with ob_pdml being defined above as function ob_pdml().

The author says it turns out to be the key factor. Now, you have to check out the documentation for the ob_start PHP function.

The ob_start function will turn output buffering on and will give the callback function a chance to process it. That’s the trick for this custom markup conversion using PHP, the author says.

The author says Flash could be similarly outputted from PHP using a markup language that would wrap the Ming library. There could also be an Excel markup language, based on PHP Spreadsheet_WriteExcel, or an image markup language to generate PNG and JPEG image using the GD graphics library.