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[nutballs]

Anyone happen to know of an online page layout app?
Probably AJAX. Definitely PHP.

Basically, I want to be able to allow customers to edit text within a brochure, and then spit out the brochure as a PDF.

Any thoughts?
I want to write as little as possible of it...

[perkiset]

I don't have a WYSIWYG editor, I just use a stock edit box for my control centers, but I use ezPDF for generating output. It's pretty good, although I don't think the developer's worked on it since '06.

I wrapped it in a class for reporting that I use all the time. The original code can be found here: http://www.ros.co.nz/pdf/ but I can get you a lot more up to date than that if you'd like. It's pretty strong, although somewhat heavy as a pure PHP class. Creating classes on top of it for things like letter head, specialized output and reports was a little tricky at first but soon enough I had it pretty tightened down.

Interestingly, I have a need to give my underwear partners something similar... it's been on my backburner because I don't want to do it LOL. Might be something there for us to do.

[nutballs]

yea the PDF output is not a problem, at least in theory.

I am thinking that a slightly different approach might work in this case.

Have the user fill out a form.
Show a JPG preview of the final result.
Allow the user to update their text.

this is intended to be fairly structured. Think of a brochure template that you can just drop your copy into, and then it produces a finished brochure for you. Its actually a very minimal part of what we are trying to do, but yet it is the most intensive part technology wise.

I think at least to get started, that might be the way to go? have a base JPG for each item, without any copy in it, and using GD or whatever to overlay the text on it. Then when all done, the PDF is generated behind the scenes, since the user never actually gets the PDF anyway.