PHP comes with a number of options to help developers dynamically generate PDF files from within their applications. The Haru and PDFlib extensions offer a complete API for dynamic PDF generation, and there also exist a number of open-source PHP components that can be used for the same purpose. This article will introduce you to one such component, the Zend_Pdf component that ships as part of the Zend Framework, and illustrate how it can be used to perform sophisticated PDF operations from within a PHP application.

p. Over at kapustabrothers.com, Shaun Farrell has started an article series on Indexing PDF Documents with Zend_Search_Lucene.

The Zend_Pdf component of the Zend Framework is intended to allow you to create or manipulate PDF documents from within your applications. In addition to its text handling capabilities, it comes complete with drawing features that allow you to creat or manipulate graphical primitives. When working with text Zend_Pdf gives you the option of using the built-in fonts or custom TrueType fonts. Its page manipulation capabilities allow you to create new pages, remove existing pages or change the order of pages already in the document. In this tutorial our goal is to give you an overview of the capabilities of Zend_Pdf.

p. This is an update to the Zend Framework Beta Release. The Zend Framework developers have been working very hard to improve the quality every week, and this Beta Refresh release includes their efforts so far. There have been 77 issues fixed since 0.9.2.