[Mapserver-users] PHP/mapscript - Inserting vector maps into PDF documents

[Antti.Roppola at brs.gov.au]

Hi all,

Around this time last year, there was some discussion on the Mapserver list about
how you'd go about including Mapserver elements in arbitrary places on a PDF being
created in PHP/Mapscript.

	http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/data2/wilma/mapserver-users/0202/msg00240.html
	http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/data2/wilma/mapserver-users/0202/msg00239.html

I've just spent quite a while browsing the mappdf source and there's a DrawMapPDF() function
that skips the creation of a new PDF object if an existing one is given as an argument,
but I can't find a hook into it through PHP/Mapscript. Nor can I see anything in this function that
would allow me to control the placement of the map in my pdf object. I guess I'd really like an
outputformat that returns PDF instructions rather than a whole document, this way I could
use pdf_translate() and pdf_scale() to do the placement myself:


	$map->selectOuputFormat("pdf_instructions");	// as opposed to a complete PDF doc

	$pdf_instructions=$map->draw();
	place($my_pdf, $pdf_instructions, $pos_xmin, $pos_ymin, $pos_xmax, $pos_ymax, $angle);

	function place ($my_pdf, $pdf_elements, $pos_ymin, $pos_xmax, $pos_ymax, $angle) {
		pdf_save($my_pdf);	// save default state
		if($angle) {
			pdf_rotate($my_pdf, $angle)
		}
		pdf_translate($my_pdf, $pos_xmin, $pos_ymin);
		...			// stuff happens to calc scaling
		pdf_scale($my_pdf, $pos_dx, $pos_dy );
		include $pdf_elements;	// you get the idea...
		pdf_restore($my_pdf);	// restore default state
}



Has anyone got any insights on where things are at?

Cheers,

Antti
N.B. I do have all the other PDF functionality such as 3.7 outputformat working, I just
want to be able to write my map objects into an existing PDF as vectors.