The school year is finally over. It has been since the last term exams, but this week we finally got the final marks and ranking. Not that bad for me: this year I finirh 67 over 132 students.
These weeks I’v been working on the pdf generation of the students transcripts. My first idea to create them was to use the Php library Fpdf, but after trying to use it I choose another option: LateX.
What’s lateX? It’s a document markup language and document preparation system for the TeX typesetting program. (Wikipedia Link ). With latex, you can produce very nice and professional looking documents, but has the “incovenient” not to be user-friendly for the Word and other writting programs users.
So, in order to create the lateX transcripts, my php script had to do 3 steps:

• recover all the data from the mySql database.
• build the .tex file with the particular syntax.
• create the pdf with latexpdf.

And loop this process throught all the students. This part of the internship has been quite interesting as I hadn’t used lateX before (wanted to, but was quite lazy to begin, shame on me), and using it has convinced me to use it for quite everything right now (I’ve recently re-writting my Resume in lateX!)

What more? I still don’t have the acceptance letter from NTU. I just got a mail saying I got a room in the graduate hall (seems to be the individual rooms!) but I have problems accepting the offer (sent a mail but has no answer yet), and another mail sayiong that i had to re-choose all my courses because the department I choose them wants to privilege the full-year students…

So, I’ll have to phone them another time on monday, to see what’s going on (thank god skype exists!).

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 29th, 2008 at 12:11 and is filed under Computers, NTU. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.