Markus Wolff
2007-08-25 22:24:47 UTC
Hey there,
in response to Andi's blog post, here's what I can say about PDF use cases.
My previous employer, a media monitoring service, uses a PHP-based
customer portal to let customers browse through media clippings that
matched their profile. These media clippings can come from a variety of
sources: Some are PDF documents, some are scanned articles in PNG or
JPEG format, some come as plain text, sometimes with HTML formatting.
The customer can choose from these clippings to generate a customized
press review in PDF format.
The PDF documents were mostly converted to images (one image per page)
before being re-inserted into the press review - mostly because it
seemed the only way to do it with some of the solutions we tried.
Depending on the media source, the images can become quite big - the
resulting PDFs can range from 10MB to 250MB in size. Not many solutions
out there can handle this amount of data. Apache FOP regularly choked,
HTMLDoc proved to be slightly better, but was unreliable as well. As far
as I know, my replacement is now evaluating FPDF to see if it can do the
job. At the time I left the company, we hadn't yet looked at Zend_PDF.
CU
Markus
in response to Andi's blog post, here's what I can say about PDF use cases.
My previous employer, a media monitoring service, uses a PHP-based
customer portal to let customers browse through media clippings that
matched their profile. These media clippings can come from a variety of
sources: Some are PDF documents, some are scanned articles in PNG or
JPEG format, some come as plain text, sometimes with HTML formatting.
The customer can choose from these clippings to generate a customized
press review in PDF format.
The PDF documents were mostly converted to images (one image per page)
before being re-inserted into the press review - mostly because it
seemed the only way to do it with some of the solutions we tried.
Depending on the media source, the images can become quite big - the
resulting PDFs can range from 10MB to 250MB in size. Not many solutions
out there can handle this amount of data. Apache FOP regularly choked,
HTMLDoc proved to be slightly better, but was unreliable as well. As far
as I know, my replacement is now evaluating FPDF to see if it can do the
job. At the time I left the company, we hadn't yet looked at Zend_PDF.
CU
Markus