PDF is great, most popular cross platform document format for this era, and it looks like still keep going on this name.

Even you are working your project with Adobe Flash or Adobe Flex application, both web or mobile platform, you may stuck with the requirement: Create PDF. This is not surprised because every enterprise (or minimal) application still need to serve user a document such as report paper. One idea to do this is to transform your digital data into PDF format.

But Flash platform doesn’t design to do great in printing (animation and interactive instead), Adobe doesn’t provide easy way for you to generate PDF document from RIA you have. But there’s many alternative solution to solve this. Let take a look one by one.

1. purepdf

An Actionscript 3 library, which ported from Java’s iText library. purepdf promises to provide you almost PDF feature you could get. The current version still 0.7 while I’m writing this article. But if you can generate PDF document from your Flash client directly, this is what you have to try.

2. TCPDF

PHP is here! TCPDF is one of robust PHP class which you can use to generate PDF document in server side. So it doesn’t matter that you develop web, or mobile application, TCPDF can receive your value from client application and generate PDF on the fly. Check it out to know does it match to your project or not.

3. FPDF

Another PHP Class, FPDF is completely free for you to use to generate PDF document, or modify its code if you need.

Conclusion

Adobe has kept the easiest way to generate PDF document for server-side or the Acrobat Family itself. So these open-source projects above may help you provides cool feature to your application.

Have a great day!