Creating PDF docs with PHP

john_w3 · 08-09-2010, 03:22 PM

Can anybody recommend a good free, reliable and robust PDF creation package?
The choices seem to be:
DOM PDF
FPDF
TCPDF and
HARU.
If anybody has any experience with any of these and can recommend or warn me against, it would be very helpful.
Thanks in advance.

timgolding · 08-09-2010, 03:37 PM

I'm having a go at doing this myself. Going to try dompdf for now. I'll let you know if it works

tfburges · 08-09-2010, 05:15 PM

FPDF works great for me! With a little effort in placing text/images on the page, it does pretty much everything I need it to.

timgolding · 08-12-2010, 11:10 AM

dompdf has worked fine for what i need it for. the file i created had some quite complicated table structures and it rendered the pdf file fine. The only thing i would say is it is quite resource hungry.

N.B Setting the page width to 800px in the html and creating an a3 page worked for fitting the content in the pdf window.

timgolding · 08-13-2010, 04:39 PM

Change of mind. I got fed up with dompdf. It wasnt rendering html tables properly. So i tried TCPDF. Seemed much better and with more functions.
It's alot bigger in size also.

disastro · 08-13-2010, 05:00 PM

If if TCPDF doesn't suit the job and you haven't already found it, I can recommend Apache FOP.

Very fine grained control over the document. It's a formatting object processor. You can build your doc as XML or (X)HTML and apply XSL stylesheets to produce a PDF. You can even replicate most CSS styles.

I like it a lot but it does come at a price ... java. If you can live with the overhead, exec('fop') will do the trick.

Also, it's released under the Apache license.

tfburges · 08-14-2010, 02:23 AM

I recommended fpdf because it's relatively fast in generating PDFs. As for the layout, you just have to get a little clever but once you get the hang of it... piece of cake! I can guide you if needed.