This article was written in 2003 and remains one of our most popular posts. If you’re keen to learn more about PDFs and documents, you may find this of great interest. Ahead Of The GameOne of the reasons I like PHP so much is its consistent support for new technologies. The language invites extensibility, making it easy for developers to add new modules to the core engine, and widespread community support has made PHP one of the most full-featured Web programming languages around, with support for a wide variety of modular extensions.
Convert HTML to PDF using PHP - Simple script to convert HTML to PDF in PHP with Dompdf. Generate PDF. Always remember a thing for designing layout that tcpdf is good for layout designing of a pdf but it doesn’t always support all CSS. Basic CSS and in line CSS are the best ways to keep the design in tcpdf. We will use third party FPDF.The FPDF is very awesome PHP class to generate PDF using PHP from MySQL database.This is open source php library to generate pdf file using PHP. PDF is very common and popular file format to read,view and write documents.PDF format is independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems.
Extensions available today allow developers to use PHP to perform IMAP and POP3 operations; dynamically construct images and Shockwave Flash movies; perform credit card validation; encrypt sensitive data; and parse XML-encoded data.This isn’t all, though. One of the more interesting items currently being bundled with PHP is the PDFLib extension, which allows developers to dynamically generate documents in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF). Over the next few pages, I’m going to take a quick look at this module, providing you with a brief overview of its functions and demonstrating how you can use it in your PHP development. So come on in, and let’s get going! Getting StartedIn order to use PHP’s PDF manipulation capabilities, you need to have the PDFLib library installed on your system. If you’re working on Linux, you can download a copy from and compile it for your box.
If you’re running Windows, your job is even simpler – a pre-built PDF library is bundled with your distribution, and all you need to do is activate it by uncommenting the appropriate lines in your PHP configuration file.Additionally, you’ll need a copy of the (free!) Adobe Acrobat PDF reader, so that you can view the documents created via the PDFLib library. You can download a copy of this reader fromOnce you’ve got everything in place, it’s time to create a simple PDF file. Here goes: Save this file, and then browse to it through your Web browser. PHP will execute the script, and a new PDF file will be created and stored in the location specified at the top of the script. Here’s what you’ll see when you open the file:Anatomy LessonLet’s take a closer look at the code used in the example above.Creating a PDF file in PHP involves four basic steps: creating a handle for the document; registering fonts and colours for the document; writing or drawing to the handle with various pre-defined functions; and saving the final document.Let’s take the first step — creating a handle for the PDF document. Create handle for new PDF document $pdf = pdfnew;This is accomplished via the pdfnew function, which returns a handle to the document. This handle is then used in all subsequent operations involving the PDF document.Next up, you need to give the PDF file a name – this is accomplished via the pdfopenfile function, which requires the handle returned in the previous operation, together with a user-defined file name.
Open a file pdfopenfile($pdf, 'philosophy.pdf');Once a document has been created, you can insert new pages in it with thepdfbeginpage function. Start a new page (A4) pdfbeginpage($pdf, 595, 842);and end pages with the – you guessed it! – pdfendpage function. End page pdfendpage($pdf);Note that the pdfbeginpage function requires two additional parameters, which represent the width and height of the page to be created in points (a point is 1/72 of an inch). American horror story s01e08 download. In case math isn’t your strong suit, the PHP manual provides width and height measurements for most standard page sizes, including A4, the one used in the example above.In between the calls to pdfbeginpage and pdfendpage comes the code that actually writes something to the PDF document, be it text, images or geometric shapes.
In this case, all I’m doing is writing a line of text to the document – so all I need to do is pick a font, and then use that font to write the text string I need to the document.Selecting and registering a font is accomplished via the pdffindfont and pdfsetfont functions. The pdffindfont function prepares a font for use within the document, and requires the name of the font, the encoding to be used, and a Boolean value indicating whether or not the font should be embedded in the PDF file; it returns a font object, which may be used via a call to pdfsetfont. $arial = pdffindfont($pdf, 'Arial', 'host', 1); pdfsetfont($pdf, $arial, 10);Once the font has been set, the pdfshowxy function can be used to write a text string to a particular position on the page.
Print text pdfshowxy($pdf, 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,', 50, 750); pdfshowxy($pdf, 'than are dreamt of in your philosophy', 50, 730);As you can see, this function requires a handle to the PDF document, a reference to the font object to be used, the text string to be written (obviously!), and the X and Y coordinates of the position at which to begin writing the text. These coordinates are specified with respect to the origin (0,0), which is located at the bottom left corner of the document.Once the text has been written, the page is closed via a call to pdfendpage. You can then add one or more extra pages, or – as I’ve done here – simply close the document via pdfclose. This will save the document contents to the file specified in the initial call to pdfopenfile, and destroy the document handle created.
Pretty As A PictureNow, that was a very simple example – but PHP’s PDF extension allows you to do a lot more than just write text to a page. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, consider this next example, which demonstrates the process of adding an image to your newly-minted PDF document.
Here’s the PDF output:Most of the magic here happens via the pdfopenimagefile andpdfplaceimage functions. The first one accepts an image type – GIF, JPEG, TIFF or PNG – and file name as arguments, and returns an image handle, which may then be re-used multiple times in the document.The image handle returned in the previous step can be used by the pdfplaceimage function, which actually takes care of positioning the image at a particular point on the page. The coordinates provided to this function (the second and third arguments) refer to the position of the lower left corner of the image, while the fourth argument specifies the scaling factor to use when displaying the image (a scaling factor of 1 will show the image at actual size, while a factor of 0.5 will reduce the image to half its size). The Shortest Distance Between Two PointsWhy stop there? PHP’s PDF extension comes with a whole bag of functions designed to let you draw lines, circles and other shapes in your PDF document. Consider the following example, which demonstrates the process of drawing a line.
Here’s what you should see in the PDF document:In this case, the process of drawing a line involves creative use of the pdfmoveto, pdflineto and pdfstroke functions.In the example above, I’d like to draw a line from the position (20,780) to the new position (575, 780). In order to do this, I first need to place the cursor at the starting point (20,780), via a call to pdfmoveto. Pdfmoveto($pdf, 20, 780);Next, I need to set the end point of the line, via pdflineto: pdflineto($pdf, 575, 780);Finally, the line is actually rendered using pdfstroke. Pdfstroke($pdf);The stroke colour is set via a call to pdfsetcolor, which accepts a number of parameters: the PDF document handle, whether the colour being set is for “stroke”, “fill” or “both”, the colour scheme to use (RGB or CMYK), and a list of colour values appropriate to the selected colour scheme. Pdfsetcolor($pdf, 'stroke', 'rgb', 0, 0, 0);It’s important to note that the list of colour values provided topdfsetcolor must be specified in terms of percentage intensity – that is, the intensity of that colour, expressed as a percentage of the maximum intensity possible. So, if I wanted to set red (RGB: 255,0,0) as the stroke colour, my call to pdfsetcolor would look like this: pdfsetcolor($pdf, 'stroke', 'rgb', 1, 0, 0);while a fill colour of yellow (RGB: 255,255,0) would be: pdfsetcolor($pdf, 'fill', 'rgb', 1, 1, 0); Square Peg, Round HoleLines aren’t the only thing you can draw – circles and rectangles also figure prominently on the menu.
Take a look at the following example, which demonstrates. Here’s the output:In this case, the pdfrect function has been used to draw a rectangle, given the coordinates of the lower left corner and the height and width. This rectangle has then been filled and outlined in two different colours, via the pdffillstroke function.
PDF stands for (Portable Document Format) which is an open source and platform independent software developed in 1990 to present documents with text formatting and with images etc. Each file includes complete description of fixed-layout flat document, which contains text, images, vectors graphics, font and other information which is necessary to display it. It getting popularity due to the capability of handling a variety of content such, an interactive element like annotation, form element, rich media including (video content), and three-dimensional image(3D) using PRC or U3D, and various other data formats. Its specification provides for encryption, digital signature, and file attachments as well. How Php Create Pdf from simple HTML form data?In the first part of this tutorial, we have explained how to create dynamic PDF file from HTML form data using PHP.for this We can generate pdf file using Php pdflib library but it bit time-consuming and not easy to understand. So For easy creation of such file mostly developer using a third party open source library which contains a lot of built-in classes, methods one of them is FPDF class which creates such file efficiently.To create PDF file dynamically from HTML form data you have to follow the following steps:1.download a library from a download section of its official site fpdf.org.2.create a simple HTML form.3.
Extract the zip file to your docs folder and then import FPDF file to your working page like create.php. //html form“