Rudy Nappee has just finished what he calls the hardest week in his Google Summer of Code project - work on the PDF output methods:

Here was the hardest GSoC week ! I wrote a big part of the PDF output and both the themes "phppdf" (each PHP manual part in a file) and "phpbigpdf" (a big PDF file with all the sections).

Rudy's project for the GSoC is to create a Docbook renderer that can take in a standard Docbook file and output it into multiple formats. This past week saw the development of the PDF output method but he's also created methods for making a CHM (Windows help file) and a manpage output format. You can keep up with his latest progress on his blog.

Rob Allen has posted a quick tip of how to use the Zend_Form component of the Zend Framework to correctly render XHTML compliant output.

When you render a Zend_Form, the elements will render to HTML compliance rather than XHTML compliance, even if you have < ?php echo $this->doctype('XHTML1_STRICT');?> at the top of your layout script. Practically, this means that all the input elements do not end in "/>". To resolve this, you need to call the doctype() view helper prior to rendering your form.

He includes an example of the doctype call (on a view object) to tell the script to output in the "XHTML1_TRANSITIONAL" format.

The main PHP website has announced the release of the new documentation build system (as Hannes Magnusson mentioned previously) is ready and has been launched for testing.

The PHP documentation team is pleased to announce the initial release of the new build system that generates the PHP Manual. Written in PHP, PhD ([PH]P based [D]ocBook renderer) builds are now available for viewing at docs.php.net. Everyone is encouraged to test and use this system so that bugs will be found and squashed.

Once the new build system is stable, expect additional changes to the PHP manual that will include an improved navigation system and styling for OOP documentation.

You can use the my.php page to set it as your default mirror if you'd like to use it seamlessly.

In a new entry today, Ben Ramsey, how's been working with the Zend Framework for a bit now, shares an interesting bit of information about how to use Views a little bit differently.

Most notably, I've started using the "new way" of using views, which is still undocumented in the manual. Rather than create a new Zend_View object, tell it where my views are, and echo a call to its render() method, I'm letting the controller's render() method do it all for me.

He illustrates with a simple example using the default framework directory setup, save for the special "scripts" directory he creates. This makes it possible for the controller to handle the rendering rather than the typical view functionality. Then, using the views is a simple init() call away, automagically.

There's plenty of 2D graphics libraries out there, some 3D ones as well, but that hasn't stopped Jakob Westhoff from creating his own driver for the Image_3d package to allow for live 3D image browser rendering.

Quite some time ago my friend Kore Nordmann had a talk at our local PHP Usergroup about 3D rendering techniques which was quite inspiring. Shortly after that talk I decided to write a simple 3D renderer. But, hey there are so many of them already out there, that I decided to do something more unusual.

I just started over and began to write a ECMA Script based live 3D renderer for browsers which understand the new "canvas" tag. After some simple tests I realized that it would be quite cool to implement this as a driver for Kore's Image_3D package, which is entirely written in PHP.

Be sure to check out his post to see what this new driver makes possible. There's an image complete with controls to rotate, zoom, turn of its axis and export to both the SVG and PNG formats. Definitely work checking out!

On PHPied.com, Stoyan shares the hacks he made to the Text_Highlighter PEAR package to get it to correctly format JSON-formatted messages.

Today I played with adding a JSON renderer. Useful in case you want to get highlighted source code in your new shiny AJAX app.

He talks about the tweaks he had to make, links to the demo of the script, and givesn an example o fhos you can use this updated version of the highlighting functionality in your scripts.