[Catalyst] Which C::View::PDF should I use?

[Charlie Garrison]

Good afternoon,

On 5/03/10 at 1:32 PM -0800, S.A. Kiehn <keenlinks at ymail.com> wrote:

>I am not a very experienced developer, but I was able to learn 
>and use PDF::Reuse. I made a PDF template (11 page report) that 
>I needed to intersperse data throughout. Using 
>Catalyst::View::PDF::Reuse I was able to achieve a good result. 
>I believe it is intended to be a reuse (of a PDF template) 
>rather than a PDF creation tool, but it would work for that as 
>well.  To use with a report was a little tougher as I had to 
>be creative to do wrapping. It is probably best to use where 
>the location to place values on a template remains consistent 
>(invoice, certificate).

And I apparently mis-read the POD before. I thought there was a 
function to *replace* text in an existing PDF with values from 
my app. (I should not have stared researching this so late in 
the day.)

So how do people insert values into an existing PDF? Do you have 
to determine X/Y position for each value to be added to the PDF?

I was expecting to be able to replace a unique string from the 
PDF with a value from my app. For some reason I though 
Catalyst::View::PDF::Reuse was doing more magic than it really is.

Is there a simpler approach (other than C::V::PDF::Reuse) for 
creating PDFs with values from my app?

Once I hand this app to my customer, they need to be able to add 
new fields to a dynamically generated form config. My plan was 
to have a html 'template' version of the form with unique values 
for each field, which the customer can print to PDF and then 
re-use in the app.

Is there some way to determine the X/Y position of existing text 
in the PDF at runtime?


On 5/03/10 at 11:15 AM +0100, Felix Antonius Wilhelm Ostmann 
<ostmann at websuche.de> wrote:

>We use simple View::TT and then a Filter:
>[%- USE Latex; FILTER latex("pdf") -%]

Can anyone advise how long the learning curve is for latex (for 
basic usage)? Would I be better off spending my time learning that?


Thanks,
Charlie

-- 
    Ꮚ Charlie Garrison ♊ <garrison at zeta.org.au>
    〠 PO Box 141, Windsor, NSW 2756, Australia

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