On the Circle.ch weblog, there's a new posting about: Designing labels with SVG and convert them to PDF with PHP.

Alan Knowles [1] described the process of designing labels with SVG and the conversion to PDF with PHP last December. There he points to an SVG editor called Sodipodi [2]. Inkscape [3] is yet another SVG editor running on various platforms [3]. Designing labes with SVG seems a reasonable approach. As Alan states correctly, the "FPDF [http://fpdf.org ] is quite a nice library for creating PDFs, however, the thought of hardcoding up all the locations in PHP, for all the text on both applications horrified me."

That is how we implemented our label printing system for LOTS 2004. Positioning a few lines of text and an image is easily done with FDPF for "design once, use many" labels.

They follow up with a few links for more information:

• http://blog.akbkhome.com/blog/archives/26_PHP_SVG_and_PDFs.html
• http://www.sodipodi.com
• http://www.circle.ch/blog/p1396.html