The PrintFu Conundrum

So when I started out building PrintFu, I figured it would be pretty easy. Just take someone's PDF, some shipping information, send them to paypal to bill them, tell the Printer the PDF is ready to be printed, and boom. That's it.. Right? WRONG.

I will be covering in detail the steps it took to build PrintFu, in hopes of helping others out there avoid some of the pit falls I ran into.

Quickly, here are some of the technologies I used to build this wonderful streamlined system (sans the grammar and spelling errors!)

PDFTK - PdfTk is a great FREE source for doing various things with PDFs, I mainly use it to get the Information that is embedded in to PDFS.

APGetPageCount - If for some reason PDFTK chokes on getting the information on a PDF, I then use this little tool to extract the page count (which is super important for PrintFu's user experience)

Apache FOP - When an order is downloaded by the Printer - I automatically generate an Order Slip that is added to the very last page of printed manual. This way all the printer has to do is look at the last page to know where to ship etc.

ColdFusion MX - I love my ColdFusion, and I don't care what anyone says. I have had nothing but great experiences with it! Really the bad rep that ColdFusion gets is mainly because 90% CF Programmers are not really programmers, they are HTMLers that want to be Programmers. Anyway - it has made building PrintFu, very enjoyable.

More Later

xhtml2pdf

Ok, so here is the beginning of my xhtml2pdf XSL that is used in printable manual generation web service (http://www.printfu.org/?mcAction=developer.ws) Tis pretty long, but you should get the idea.

The possibilities of this are completely endless, I have built a couple prototypes using this to generate killer looking PDFs like: a Guitar Tab to Guitar Tab Book (http://www.printfu.org/sub/tab/), A Job Resume book, and more. I would love to hear other ideas.

I use Apache FOP to generate the PDFs. You can view the XSL here.

Welcome to the FuBlog

Wonderful! PrintFu now has a blog. Here we will cover various aspects of the business and the technology that runs the business. The main site can be found at http://www.printfu.org/