Introduction

Creating and Loading PDF Documents

The Zend_Pdf class represents PDF documents and provides document-level operations.

To create a new document, a new Zend_Pdf object should first be created.

Zend_Pdf class also provides two static methods to load an existing PDF document. These are the Zend_Pdf::load() and Zend_Pdf::parse() methods. Both of them return Zend_Pdf objects as a result or throw an exception if an error occurs.

Example #1 Create new or load existing PDF document

  1. ...
  2. // Create a new PDF document
  3. // Load a PDF document from a file
  4. // Load a PDF document from a string

The PDF file format supports incremental document update. Thus each time a document is updated, then a new revision of the document is created. Zend_Pdf component supports the retrieval of a specified revision.

A revision can be specified as a second parameter to the Zend_Pdf::load() and Zend_Pdf::parse() methods or requested by calling the Zend_Pdf::rollback() method. [1] Zend_Pdf::rollback() call.

Example #2 Requesting Specific Revisions of a PDF Document

  1. ...
  2. // Load the previous revision of the PDF document
  3. // Load the previous revision of the PDF document
  4. // Load the first revision of the PDF document
[1] method must be invoked before any changes are applied to the document, otherwise the behavior is not defined.

Introduction