I work for a care centre that would like a feature on their website where friends and family can choose from a selection of care cards to deliver to someone they know. They will be able to choose a title, an image and type in some text on the card that we assemble and deliver. They need me to make an application for them that assembles the cards in a printer-friendly fashion (placing text and images in the right areas) that they will print and fold before delivery.
Image of what I am trying to create: https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ddj4L.png
Reading about how to do this I realize that I have two issues:
- Size of card on-screen can’t be fixed due to printer DPI
- Should I use html/CSS to make a table with 4 cells to create this card? Php image library? JavaScript?
Any help would great.
I have the best luck, in terms of printing, with PDFs. The document format is nice, too, because it is portable and the user may choose to print somewhere other than where they accessed your site.
The best PDF-generating library I’ve used for PHP is fPDF: http://www.fpdf.org/
PDFs are great for printing full-page documents. All but the most ancient operating systems provide users the ability to open and print PDFs, and because PDF is a document format the printed output is fairly consistent between systems and printers.
The other route you suggest is certainly possible – you can build it up using HTML and CSS. There are serious drawbacks to this, however. Foremost, each user is going to have varying printer settings in their browser, and the browser is not configured by default to be good to your full-page printing. Most user agents add page numbers, margins, the date & time, the URL…. in short, your print from the browser is going to rely on the user tinkering with their browser print settings. There is nothing you can do to influence these settings from your end.