We are developing a website to offer our users some calculators using some converted excel spreadsheets. Once the user enter data into the spreadsheet the values are calculated. We then want an option to convert the calculated result into a PDF for printing and retention.
[size=2][font=arial]The convert to pdf function doesn’t work properly. I’ve realised that the online service converts the html page from the server not from the client, so whilst it faithfully produces a pdf of the spreadsheet it does so only of the unchanged spreadsheet - that is to say that it doesn’t capture the changes that a user will have made to the sheet.[/font][/size] [size=2][font=arial]This means that effectively we need to take a screenshot of the client’s live page somehow and then convert that to a pdf file that can be saved and/or downloaded. I have been doing some research on this before I realised we had a problem with the online converter because I wanted a more elegant way of doing the conversion. The upshot is that this is now going to be extremely difficult to achieve, if at all.
[/font][/size] [size=2][font=arial]What I’ve found so far would seem to suggest that it would at least need to be a two stage process - capture an image of the screen (probably a png file) and then convert that to a pdf. However, I don’t think I can do this in php because the php function ‘grabscreen’ doesn’t work under a Linux server. I think it may be possible using .NET but I have absolutely no experience of .NET at all.
Can anyone suggest an alternate solution and we do not want to go down the .NET route.
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