How to create PDF Invoice on the fly

How do they do it?

[aspdaddy]

Those sites where you login, buy domains etc, pay and then can download a pdf invoice.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

I have adobe distiller on my local pc but I can only distill invoices from an existing word doc.

Hopefully you dont need office/word installed on the server to do this feature?

Thanks.

[coopster]

Basically you are writing out text, much like you do an HTML page, except in the Portable Document Format. You can usually find classes or other packages where somebody has done the bulk of the setup/code for you and all you need to do is learn how to use the class/package. I mean, you could write your own from scratch, but you will obviously be looking at a bit longer development period ;-)

There are also commercial software packages that will do it all for you too.

[mattglet]

Do a search for "free pdf component". I've used it in the past, works quite nicely.

[aspdaddy]

Thanks.
Coopster does that method create a pdf in the
browser without actually making/saving a pdf file on the server

[Xenon001]

[xmlgraphics.apache.org...]

Try this. With this ... hm ... "tool" I generated invoices as pdf for orders.

Very powerfull ... perhaps to complex.

[MrSpeed]

I remember something I did a few years ago with a form in asp.

Do a search for:
"How to populate a PDF file's form with data from a web server"

There's an article at planetpdf.

[coopster]

... does that method create a pdf in the
browser without actually making/saving a pdf file on the server

Yes. It writes out the *code* that a PDF reader would interpret and present to you. You would send off the correct MIME-content in an HTML header prior to the actual *coded* content. Of course an alternative to that is that you could save that *coded* string as a file with a .pdf extension on the server if you wanted to, or send it to the browser, or ... you get the picture.