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We are planning to create a business card designer where users can add text, change font, color etc. They should also be able to add images from clip-art to these cards. We need to save this design and get a preview of what they have done.

We would also need an output for printing this to business cards for admin. We heard that output should be in SVG for preserving quality for printing.

We had started with one Flex programmer and we faced multiple issue while saving this custom template from Flex. They were not able to position the text properly in the output compared to what we see the in the flex design tool. For example, if we add a text to the bottom left and save the design, in the preview it was moving towards right side compared to what we designed in the Flex editor.

Now we need a good idea whether this feasible in flex with saving this output in a server side language (PHP). While saving, we would need flex to send x and y positions, color, text, font etc to a PHP script so that server can run this save feature in the background to save the time. When we tried with developer last time, PHP was getting wrong x and y coordinates and they were not able to save this properly.

We would need to know whether this tool is feasible with flex, PHP. We would also need guidance on what output format needs to be exported from flex so that we can use this for printing. We dont want the Flex to save this output though as it can make the user to wait for long time while sending this output to the server.

Rcrd 009
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  • This indeed possible with Flex+PHP (e.g. here's a [commercial one](http://siliconpublishing.com/products/silicondesigner/)). SVG is a good format for this, sure. I'm doing a [vaguely similar project](http://stackoverflow.com/a/10300498/472495), although since the rendering is server-side it's not so WYSIWYG as Flex. – halfer Aug 13 '12 at 11:32
  • I voted to close; as I'm not sure what information you're after. You did not ask a specific question. For Printing in Flex; you may consider creating a bitmap of the "component" you want to print. Or you may consider sending all the data to the server and recreating the template from scratch. It sounds like you may be doing the latter; but it is tough to debug without any code. – JeffryHouser Aug 13 '12 at 13:43
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    I have no experience with flex, but why do you actually need flex? You can do it with PHP only (and maybe some JavaScript for dynamic changes). Just use PHP GD library (is a standard most of the time anyway). You can save, convert images (jpg, png, ...), use positions (x,y) and probably much more. Furthermore, flash is certainly not a technology used in web in the future. It is drastically decreasing, so just in my opinion I would not want to depend on flash. – Chris Aug 13 '12 at 11:26
  • GD may not be suitable, since it is just a bitmap approach - unless it is just used for rendering to screen, and there's a vector format used for conversion to PDF. – halfer Aug 13 '12 at 12:56
  • @Chris thank you for your message... We are looking for a tool like below http://w2p.flexiprint.in/index2.php?option=com_order&task=editor_fc&product_id=MjIxNA==&id=NTA2&type=YWZmaWxpYXRl&flag=bmV3&ref_id=NTA2&Itemid=248&quote_id=57713 Unless if there are any open source tools for javascript, it would be difficult to get a perfect tool compatible with all browsers. Do you know any open source javasscript tools for this? As you said, javascript is my first preference. Only thing is that the cost and time of development. – Rcrd 009 Aug 13 '12 at 13:02
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    SVG Edit http://svg-edit.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/editor/svg-editor.html is an open source JS/SVG drawing app. I've implemented it (with business cards) here: http://method.ac – methodofaction Aug 13 '12 at 16:07
  • @www.Flextras.com: sorry, I don't understand why you want to close this question and closed my answer. IMO it is OK if you told me Hot Dogs would sell better or whatever, why not suggest it? It is obvious that you are programming in Flex, OK. But this should not be a reason not to let other users suggest different approaches. As I cannot edit my answer, I will have to add the solutions Rcrd 009 asked for in the comments here. – Chris Aug 13 '12 at 22:58
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    @Rcrd009: here are some links you could have a look at: http://www.farinspace.com/top-svg-javascript-libraries-worth-looking-at/, http://raphaeljs.com, also on SO already discussed here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/410146/vector-graphics-in-javascript – Chris Aug 13 '12 at 22:59
  • @Chris I didn't close your answer; that was an administrator's decision. However, it most likely happened because your answer was "Not an Answer". The purpose of StackOverflow is to provide direct answers to specific questions. the discussion of alternate technologies or approaches can be great; but this is not the place for them. – JeffryHouser Aug 14 '12 at 00:22
  • It is very unfortunate to see that my genuine issues are closed without getting correct solution.. Thank you to everyone for their comments. Special thanks to Chris, @Duopixel for giving valid inputs... I would continue this research on some other platform.. If I can customize SVG editor given by Duopixel, I should get a solution.. Anyway, once again thanks to everyone – Rcrd 009 Aug 14 '12 at 04:58
  • @www.Flextras.com: IMO it was a specific answer, there is even a JavaScript tag on the question, and Rcrd009 stated in the comments that JS was OK. Sad that the outcome is that Rcrd009 will go and ask on other plattforms, keeping a bad memory of SO in mind - I doubt that this is the purpose of SO to not let users answer questions, if there are some willing to help and the user asking was even glad for the answers... – Chris Aug 14 '12 at 10:23
  • @chris I did not notice that the question was improperly tagged; if I did I may have removed the JavaScript tag; as the question text makes no reference to JavaScript. – JeffryHouser Aug 14 '12 at 13:28

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