**Updated May 14, 2010

I've been working on creating a full featured application which takes advantage of the robust Adobe Text Layout Framework to produce print ready documents from layouts created in flex. I began using php's Imagick to render the images at 300 dpi, then inserted that jpg into dynamic pdfs using libraries such as PDFLib or TCPDF. This was successful until a certain point and also had a lot of limitations. I was not able to get the text to layout exactly as you seen on screen and of course using jpgs for print is not exactly the best solution because of the anti-aliasing, and poor quality when scaled, etc.

After a lot of long hours and hard work I invented a better solution to render the pdfs. The results are awesome. I'm talking full replication of text positioning, size, color, kerning, indentation, just about everything. Not only am I able to layout the text correctly but I allow the user to rotate and position the text over backgrounds and set custom fonts. This method renders the text in the pdf as vector text, so when printing you get the exact representation of the text keeping perfect print fidelity. I've created a very small demo for everyone to try out the initial prototype and see the possibilities that are available. In the next part to this series I hope to have a working application that will allow you to create a postcard for example, and position and rotate the text, add images, and render a postcard size pdf for print.

You can check out the working prototype here: Demo. Click on the Save to pdf button to generate a pdf of the text in the editor preview. Leave some comments, let me know what you think!