Simple Perl PDF Creation

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

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Simple Perl PDF Creation by juster (Friar) on Dec 13, 2011 at 18:28 UTC
PDF::Reuse is probably the simplest game in town. It's pure perl, "fast", has only one module, and is not OO. No it's not like TT. When I used it I calculated the position of each line to place the text.	[reply]
Re^2: Simple Perl PDF Creation by Sewi (Friar) on Dec 13, 2011 at 19:22 UTC
PDF::Reuse is very strong and easy to work with if you add some (even readonly) form fields to your document and just fill in their values. Users can't change them (because they're readonly), but if you wanna change just a few lines, try it out. Try out Padre - the free Perl IDE and visit my blog's Perl section.	[reply]
Re^2: Simple Perl PDF Creation by grantm (Parson) on Dec 14, 2011 at 21:33 UTC
I'll put in another vote for PDF::Reuse. It's lightweight from the perspective of: few dependencies quick to load very fast at runtime API is small The interface is nothing like Template Toolkit. Instead you call functions to select a font and then write text to particular X, Y coordinates. The text can be aligned left, right or centered but if you need to wrap text in a box then you'll have to do the hard work yourself - which might make a different module a better choice. Also if you want to draw lines or boxes then the API really just lets you inject the relevant raw PDF commands - which some people might consider a negative.	[reply]
Re: Simple Perl PDF Creation by MidLifeXis (Monsignor) on Dec 13, 2011 at 17:28 UTC
PDF::Template is one I have used in the past. There has been some movement on it in the last few years, however, so I am not sure what the current state of it is. --MidLifeXis	[reply]
Re: Simple Perl PDF Creation by choroba (Cardinal) on Dec 13, 2011 at 17:03 UTC
For simple PDF's, I usually generate LaTeX sources with Perl and then compile them to PDF's through pdflatex.	[reply]
Re: Simple Perl PDF Creation by chrestomanci (Priest) on Dec 13, 2011 at 21:34 UTC
I posted a question about pdf generation from templates about a year ago, it might be worth reading the answers I got. My eventual solution was to to go via SVG. I prepared an SVG template by drawing it in a graphics program and then opening the SVG file in an editor and replacing elements with template tags. I then filled in the template with perl Text::Template (I dare say other templating systems such as Catalyst's favourite Template::Toolkit would work as well). Once I had an SVG file I fed it through svg2pdf (that comes with Inkscape) to convert to PDF. Bear in mind that my project involved a lot of vector & bitmaped graphics, and not a lot of text. If you need to put a lot of text into your PDF files then my solution may not work as well as you are likely to have to do things like line breaks yourself.	[reply]
Re: Simple Perl PDF Creation by trwww (Priest) on Dec 13, 2011 at 17:53 UTC
What I settled on is HTML::HTMLDoc. It turns HTML documents in to PDF. This way I can serve a html version of a datagroup, and then if I want a "hard copy" I can pdf the html. There are a few caveats. You have to have the underlying c htmldoc library installed so theres a bit of maintenance involved getting it set up and/or moving your app around, and for me I had to settle on htmldoc-1.8.27 because newer versions didn't give me the pdf formatted how I wanted. But if you can deal with those it is a nice tool to get .pdf of your documents	[reply]
Re: Simple Perl PDF Creation by xorl (Deacon) on Dec 13, 2011 at 20:30 UTC
What I'd suggest is using a pdf form. Create one where everything is already set except for your 3 or 4 dynamic fields. In perl create a related xfdf file (xfdf is a lot easier than fdf since it is an xml based file). Then make a system call to pdftk (http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/) to merge the data into the form and output the pdf with your dynamic data.	[reply]