PHP - LaTeX rendering

Question

I am in the design stages of a new project which will take a data set and load it into a document, then render the document around a template. The rendered file could be a data set of CSV, a PDF marketing letter, an email, ... a lot of things. The data will not be math equations, I'm simply looking at an elegant way of connecting many data sources into many documents and outputting in many templates

I'm entirely in the dark here with using latex in php. Is there anything like this out there? Most of what I could are plugins find is focused on rendering latex equations into one PNGs rather than allowing me to decide between PDF, CSV, raw-text, etc...

Alternatively, could I do this with something else?

Answer 1

I have implemented such an approach years (2002?) ago with smarty templates and producing PDF, CSV, HTML, XML (would be no problem via Smarty Template)......from the same data....May be you can take a look a fpdf.org ...

EDIT: May be you can take a look at http://railscasts.com/episodes/220-pdfkit (May be there existing an PHP pear package etc. for this ?)

Answer 2

I'm not sure whether this is what you are looking for, but there exist JavaScript libraries that are able to render LaTeX formulas on the client-side and display them in the browser using the fonts that are also used by LaTeX. For this, have a look at MathJax or its predecessor jsMath.