Tag: snippets

Set up a Weekly (weekend) autoresponder

Years ago I set up an autoresponder to let people know I’m probably not around on Saturday and Sunday. It’s still running, and flawlessly, so I thought I’d share how I set it up using cPanel cron and FTP/File Manager. I got this idea originally from David Heath-Whyte’s blog, but adjusted it a little bit. It might help you to see two examples if you want to set this up yourself and aren’t quite sure how. Sometimes having the same thing explained twice by two different people helps! Note: this advice only works for people with self-hosted email. Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! etc., look elsewhere. Also, you’ll need hosting with access to a cPanel. Step 1: Set up and compose your Autoresponder email Head over to your cPanel (“control panel”). Most hosting accounts will have a control panel of some sort, continue reading…

Printing a barcode or QR Code on a PDF

If you are or even if you are not using WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads but are still programming in PHP, I am available to consult on your TCPDF barcoding project to get it running. Get in touch!   The WaterWoo PDF Premium and EDDiMark PDF plugins can add barcodes and QR codes to PDFs dynamically upon download request via WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads. This is because both WordPress plugins use TCPDF to write PDF content, and TCPDF allows for barcode creation. Though this blog post might also be helpful for someone just trying to figure out how to write a barcode with TCPDF and PHP, these instructions are more geared toward a WordPress developer wishing to add 1D or 2D barcodes to existing PDF files. For WaterWoo, use the ‘wwpdf_add_barcode’ filter hook in the plugin (located in classes/wwpdf-watermark.php). continue reading…

Custom Fonts with WooStamper (SetaStamper)

The SetaPDF library which PDF Stamper is built on allows quite a bit of font customization to be done. More on SetaPDF and font manipulations. For the meantime, a quick tutorial on how to get other fonts beyond the three packaged with the plugin (Times, Courier, and Helvetica). Start by finding a TrueType font (.ttf) file which suits your needs. Try to keep the file size small, subsetting if necessary so that your server isn’t bogged down managing a large font file while trying to manipulate your PDF. Upload the file to your wp-content/uploads directory, somewhere it won’t get overwritten. It makes sense to use the woostamper folder, so we’ve gone ahead and done that below. Arimo is a TrueType font which works for our purposes, so we have uploaded it to a folder “arimo.” Look at the function below continue reading…

Adding Custom Fonts to EDDiStamper

All three new Stamper plugins (EDDiStamper, PDF Stamper, and Download Monitor Stamper) come with the three standard PDF fonts: Helvetica, Times New Roman, and Courier. Not much to get excited about, I know. Whereas EDDiMark and WaterWoo (plugins based on TCPDF, not SetaPDF-Stamper) have built-in font uploaders with more instant gratification, the integration with Seta is a bit more complicated, and so you’ll need to use a little code. Whether you add the code into a custom plugin, your child theme functions.php file, or by using the more plug-n-play Code Snippets plugin doesn’t matter. Before using the following example code, we have started by creating a “fonts” folder inside the wp-content/uploads/eddistamper/ folder. We put our Comic Sans (yes!) TTF file inside the fonts folder. You can see that path reflected in line 6 of the code below. So, put the continue reading…

Beyond Stamping PDFs with Custom Fonts

If you have tried to use the included font uploader in WaterWoo or EDDiMark, most the time you will be satisfied. It makes it very easy to add and watermark PDFs in nearly any font.

Unfortunately for some users whose languages require special characters, those characters might not be mapped in the font definition files and the dreaded ??????? or ▯▯▯▯▯▯▯ will show. That’s stressful!