Printing to a strict template (multipage invoices / multiple delivery labels per sheet etc)

Question

I would like to be able to print out hard copies of some strict templates.

Primarily I would like to eliminate the web browsers header and footer garbage that plagues printing from the web. I am prepared to be locked into a specific web browser for the purposes of printing such documents, as I understand this is a source of variability.

Specific examples of documents to be printed are:

• Full page / multipage invoices that would require line breaks in specific places (and the ability to provide a custom page header for each individual page)
• Printing to label paper (6/8 labels per A4), which would require fairly decent precision in order to print to the correct regions of the paper, as well as being able to specify page breaks for printing a multitude of labels across a many pages.

Is there a Drupal specific method for achieving this, preferably directly from browser to printer, although alternatively via PDF or some other means?

I understand that I might need to settle for something less-than-perfect, but anything available that is either Drupal specific would be greatly appreciated. For non-Drupal solutions, I have posted a similar question here at StackOverflow.

Answer 1

You can look into Fill PDF as an option. For this, you'd have to pre-create the templates with fillable form fields and would probably need a bit of programmatic glue to deal with page breaks, number of pages, etc. Fill PDf basically lets you use tokens from nodes and webforms to populate fillable PDF fields.

It would probably make achieving your template easiser.