SugarCRM: Pdf generation

I'm a newbie to SugarCRM development. In my project, I have to generate a pdf for one entity details(say Account details). On details page, I have added "Print PDF" button, upon clicking this button I have one independent script (I mean to say that it was not implemented as per Sugar framework). In this script we are querying database for the required details and building one html string. Using html2pdf library, converting this html string to pdf.

I dont know whether it is an efficient implementation or not, but everything is working fine as per the requirement. But we have one problem when the original string contains some special characters like currency symbols of different countries. We are getting the html fine, but in pdf getting question marks (?) for those special characters.

While trying to fix this issue, when I looked into SugarCRM code, I found some pdf classed inside includes/ directory that creating an impression that Sugar itself has some built-in library to generate pdf's. Is it true? If that is true, will it solve my problem, i.e. displaying different countries currency symbo开发者_如何学JAVAls in pdf.

Can anybody please help me to in resolving this. Thanks in advance.

-Venkat Nehatha

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Venkat, SugarCRM does indeed have its own pdf generation ability. We use it to generate customer orders, quotes, invoices, and statements.

Though I've done some work on the pdf generation myself, I don't think I'm really experienced enough to be able to guide someone else in detail in the use of Sugar's pdf capabilities. I can tell you that we use pdf generation only in our own custom modules, so the files are found in [sugarRoot]/modules/[customModule]/. (You may know that unless you know exactly what you're doing, NEVER modify the main SugarCRM files in the [root]/modules/ folder!) In the previously mentioned custom module folder are two sub-folders, "sugarpdf", which has the code that accesses the modules/database to get the information to write to the pdf, and a "tpls" folder that holds the layout information for the header, body, and footer of the pdf, in HTML format, using the information from the sugarpdf folder's file.

I strongly recommend you visit the SugarCRM developer forums where you will be in touch with many developers much more experienced than me in Sugar.

I hope this helps in some way.