Recently I had to write a class that could generate PDF payslips. Going for the easy option I wanted to take the existing template to re-use it and overlay the text from the database onto the template rather than redraw the entire payslip layout (which is just simply time consuming in PHP).

My chosen PDF library is FPDF so my first attempt was to create a graphic (png/jpeg) of the existing template and use the Image() function in FPDF to add the image to the PDF. However, this didn’t work as well as I’d have hoped since the image became very blurry. I believe this is due to the image being output at 72dpi onto the PDF when it actually needs greater resolution to be usable.

Obviously a better solution was needed, enter FPDI which allows you to load a PDF file as a template. So now all I needed to do was use the payslip PDF as a template and just overlay the text onto the template. FPDI makes this extremely simple – just include the required class file and do the following:-

$pdf = new FPDI();
$count = $pdf->setSourceFile("payslip-template.pdf");
$template = $pdf->import(1, "/MediaBox");
$pdf->addPage();
$pdf->useTemplate($template);

Now all you have to do is populate your content into/over the template and output it as normal.

One caveat I did notice was that FPDI seemed to be sending the files out with the mime type “application/x-download” rather than “application/pdf” which caused my browser to not know what to do with the file if I chose to open it rather than save it. My solution was to reset the Content-type header after outputting the PDF by taking advantage of existing output buffering in my application:-

ob_clean();
$pdf->Output("payslip.pdf", "D");
header("Content-type: application/pdf");
exit;

This works because output buffering allows us to change the headers that have already been output. If you do not currently have output buffering enabled in your code change the “ob_clean();” line to “ob_start();”.

FPDI is released under the Apache Software License, Version 2.0 which is compatible with the GNU GPL Version 3.

Coding pdf, pdf templates, php

Well I’ve had a bit of a “winter cleanup” of my site and removed most of the pages, this site is now going to focus on just being a blog rather than being a site containing a blog.

The about me and gallery pages have gone and the links and contact pages have been rewritten to be WordPress style pages.

I also found a pretty cool theme called iNove, edited it a bit to change the header and here it is! A site redesign, looks alot better IMO.

General cleanup, redesign

So (quite a few years on) I started playing Dungeon Keeper 2 again – it’s still a great game and very recommended.

Having completed the single campaign I thought it’d be fun to start making my own levels, however I hit a problem in that the DK2 Editor crashes under both WinXP (and Win98 – yes, I tried it…) when trying to add an Action to a Hero Party member. This is quite annoying since if you have the Lord of the Land in a hero party you’re unable to setup some important actions, like: “Attach Portal Gem” and “Make Objective”.

Searching the newsgroup alt.games.dungeon-keeper. I found someone (MercAngel) who’d figured out a patch to make this work, however it didn’t work on WinXP but it did work on Win98 – but it’s tiresome to have to load up my Win98 virtual machine everytime I want to create actions under hero party members so I thought I’d look into this myself and see if I could get it to work under WinXP.

After an hour or two of poking around in OllyDbg I’d come up with something that appears to work! It resembles MercAngel’s patch in quite a few ways (so credit to him).

For ease of installation I’ve created a patch program using PatchWise which you can download from here: dk2heropartyactionfix.zip.

Note: YOU USE THIS PATCH ENTIRELY AT YOUR OWN RISK.

It seems to work, and personally, I’d use it but it’s for you to decide if you want to use it. All I will say is that if it crashes while trying to do something different then you could use the patched DK2 Editor to add/edit hero party actions and the original unpatched one to  do everything else.

For those who are curious about what it patches, here’s the output of a binary file comparison using fc:-

C:\km\dk2edit>fc /b "DK2 Editor.exe.old" "DK2 Editor.exe"
Comparing files DK2 Editor.exe.old and DK2 EDITOR.EXE
0001B4E3: C3 83
0001B4E4: 90 F8
0001B4E5: 90 00
0001B4E6: 90 75
0001B4E7: 90 03
0001B4E8: 90 8D
0001B4E9: 90 41
0001B4EA: 90 0C
0001B4EB: 90 C3

And the difference in the assembly:-

OLD:
:0041B4E0 8B410C                 mov eax, dword[ecx+0C]
:0041B4E3 C3                     ret

:0041B4E4 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90               ............

NEW:
:0041B4E0 8B410C                 mov eax, dword[ecx+0C]
:0041B4E3 83F800                 cmp eax, 000
:0041B4E6 7503                   jne 0041B4EB
:0041B4E8 8D410C                 lea eax, dword[ecx+0C]
:0041B4EB C3                     ret
:0041B4EC 90 90 90 90                                       ....

Gaming, Tech dk2, dungeon keeper 2, hero parties, patch