Hello,
I started by asking this in the CSS forum but I think I may be going about this the wrong way.
I have developed an app that manages students courses.
Part of this app is that once the student completes the course, the admin has to print a certification card for the student.
The certification card is on a preprinted sheet that gets fed through the printer.
Has space for student name, instructor name, card valid date, training location, etc.
I have created a section of the PHP site called "Card printing" and in this section the admin selects the students that he wants to print cards for and clicks "print"
form there I am lost on what to do.
It needs to create a card for each student, export it to PDF or .doc file and then align perfectly with the preprinted cards.
What is the recommended way of doing this? If i am going to PDF do I still need to create a print CSS? Any way PHP can handle something like this?
I think you were on the right track with the CSS using a print style sheet. You have a great deal of control with CSS print styles. Here is a decent article on what styles should exist print media type.
You can open a window with your certificate and CSS print layout using JavaScript. You can also issue a window().print to automatically print a selected certificate.
There are definitely frameworks for generating PDFs in PHP as well, fpdf (for one) coupled with fpdi is very powerful.
With fpdi you can create a template of your cards (leave the sections you need to fill out blank), load the template, feed it to fpdf, and then write your text in the appropriate locations.
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