Re: Re: Paragraph and documentation

spinningwebz2002 wrote:
> Probably Variables is the wrong word. What I was thinking, if I have 
> to write routines to use the text->text for bold, italic etc, then it 
> would be necessary to know where the line ended so that the next 
> block of text would start after it.

Try $text->textpos;

> 
> For the time being I am using text->paragraph and setting it up so it 
> is only one line long, this way I get what was overflowed back and 
> then create the next line below it until all text is done displaying. 
> I did this so I can catch when I reach the bottom of the page and add 
> a new page. It will also allow me to do things like wrap text around 
> a photo, have varying line width etc. 
> 
> Ideally what I think I may end up doing is rewriting the text-
>> paragraph as my own routine that would catch simple html markup 
> (<B><I><U><UL> etc) in a line and handle it automatically.

Hardly simple since you would have to use an HTML parser.  It would be 
better if you used a Perl structure.  Each paragraph could be an array 
of hashes.  For example:

my $paragraph = [
   {
     bold => 0,
     italic => 0,
     underline => 0,
     text => 'This is plain text. ',
   },
   {
     bold => 1,
     italic => 0,
     underline => 0,
     text => 'This is bold text. ',
   },
];

> 
> One thing I notice is that it takes pdf::api2 a bit to get started, 
> is this due to the use strict;? If so, when my code is done can I 
> remove that to speed up the process? Or, will the pdf::api2 run under 
> mod_perl?

I have never tried PDF::API2 with mod_perl.  Let me know how it goes.

PDF::API2 takes a long time to load since it has a lot of fonts.  Most 
of their metrics are not loaded until you actually use a font; some of 
the delay you see is the loading of the font metrics you do use.  In 
other words, it's just big.


-- 
Just my 0.00000002 million dollars worth,
    Shawn

"For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by 
doing them."
   Aristotle