tomazos has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have a scalar containing a multi-paragraph sequence of English text.

I want to convert this into a PDF. I want reasonable margins and maybe page numbers if it is easy, but that's about it.

I've had a quick look through the available PDF modules and they all look like they have quite complex APIs.

Is there one out there that is something like: 

my $pdf = PDF::Simple::make_pdf_from_text($text);
print MYPDFFILE $pdf;

[download]

...or am I dreaming?

-Andrew.

Andrew Tomazos  |  andrew@tomazos.com  |  www.tomazos.com

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Simple Text to PDF
by fmerges (Chaplain) on Aug 06, 2005 at 01:40 UTC

    Hi,

    Take a look at HTMLDOC and HTML::HTMLDoc

    For mee it was very usefull for creating a PDF output hack when the site was actually complete... this kinds of addons that get notified when all is done ;-)

    Update: here you can see what you need.

    Regards,

    |fire| at irc.freenode.net
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Re: Simple Text to PDF
by newroz (Monk) on Aug 06, 2005 at 12:18 UTC
    Use Text-PDF-0.25 I use below code for produce pdf from a proper text file. 
    #!/usr/bin/perl
use Text::PDF::File;
use Text::PDF::Page;
use Text::PDF::Utils;       # not strictly needed
use Text::PDF::SFont;
$/=undef;
my $file1=shift;
open (SUSAM,"$file1");
my $ligne=<SUSAM>;

my @fischier=split(/\n/,$ligne);
my $pdf = Text::PDF::File->new;
$root = Text::PDF::Pages->new($pdf);
$root->proc_set("PDF", "Text");
$root->bbox(0, 0, 595, 840);
$page = Text::PDF::Page->new($pdf, $root);
$font = Text::PDF::SFont->new($pdf, 'Helvetica', 'F0');     
$root->add_font($font);
$i=800;
foreach(@fischier){
$page->add("BT 1 0 0 1 1 $i Tm /F0 13 Tf ('$_') Tj ET");
$i=$i-12;
}
$page->{' curstrm'}{'Filter'} = PDFArray(PDFName('FlateDecode'));
$pdf->out_file("c.pdf");

    [download]
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Re: Simple Text to PDF
by tlm (Prior) on Aug 06, 2005 at 13:26 UTC

    In Unix I use something like 

    % enscript -Bp - file.txt | ps2pdf - file.pdf

    [download]
    If it needs to be from within perl, and quick-and-dirty is good enough, then use system with the above, and let 'er rip.

    (I've seen mentions of text2pdf and txt2pdf online, but never bothered to get either; I just made a shell function to shorten the above.)

    the lowliest monk

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