I have to create some nicely formatted charts (bar and 3D pie) from dynamic data using PHP 5.3 and for output as PDF report. The report is not to be rendered to the screen at all. I have made the charts using pChart2 as .png files and imported them using tcpdf. The system works, but the quality level is poor, rendering text as a graphic causes the font edges to be blurry etc. when printed. I tweaked the image size of the .PNG output, and it made some improvements but it increases the file size, and the text still looks blurry.
So what I am after is a library to create charts using PHP that can be exported to .svg or .eps format, so elements are drawn by the printer and render sharply for print. Using TCPDF I have imported our logos that are in .EPS format, and the difference between the images is quite marked.
I have seen there is a library called ezcomponents that i can give a try. But before I dive in, is there any advice on what to try before proceeding?
I have had reasonable success rendering the images on a canvas that is two to three times larger than what I ultimately need and then, once I'm finished, using the imagecopyrresampled() function to copy the large image onto a canvas with smaller dimensions, which I save as a png and add to the PDF file. The dithering is pretty good and curved lines, in particular, benefit greatly from this approach. Text might not benefit quite as much, but its worth trying, because it should require very few changes to your code to experiment with this approach.
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I am using HTML2PDF converter in order to export web page to PDF file. The issue I have faced is that the result PDF is to large (more than 1 MB). I want to reduce it, so here is what I have basically:
2 images (100 KB both)
1 Courier Bulgarian font - added
3 tables with a lot of inline styles of each cell
Could these things lead to the large size of the output PDF? And could anyone share some experience and best practices with the library in order to get smaller PDF as result.
Thanks in advance.
If you have access to Adobe Acrobat, it'll let you peek in the PDF and see which areas use what percentage of space. This would tell you how much of the space is taken up by images, fonts etc... If you make a sample PDF available I'll be happy to take a look at it.
How much space in the PDF is used by different objects really depends on how the PDF was written and how efficiently it uses different compression algorithms. For example, images can be ZIP, JPEG or even JPEG-2000 compressed in PDF, the question is what HTML2PDF does with your images.
Fonts can be big as well - depending on what the size of the original font is.
Page content (your tables with inline styles etc) are written in a condensed textual format (for example 1 0 0 rg would be the instruction to set the fill color for text and line-art to red). Normally efficient PDF writers will write all of these textual instructions and then ZIP compress them, which means they won't take much place in the file.
So you'd really need to take a look at the PDF file itself to see where the space is used. That will allow you to start looking at the library to see if it can be made more efficient.
To start with...
Have one separate page for printing and displaying - for printing.
While printing use Ptint.CSS and include as less as possible classes
In those three tables. Keep only require classes in CSS. Please use compress images for printing e.g if you have BMP in display use the PNG for printing.
Make tables simple using TR-TD and make them less colorfull do not put inline CSS.
This may help you to save PDF in compress version.
I have mananged to find what causes the big size of my output PDFs files. It last the fonts.
For my task I have used courier bulgarian (italics, normal and bold). This means I have embeded three additional fonts.
Something more, I do not know, but helvica is the defauld font for this PHP library and althought I am not using it, it is embeded to the PDFs too.
If you meet the same issue, open all files that have "helvica" and replace the "helvica" font with this that you are using.
I have written an web application that dynamically creates PDFs that contain only 1-page that has various vector graphics in it, say for example a complex pie or bar chart. In the back-end I have need to scale this PDF and its contents programaticaly to a few different sizes for print.
The few tools I've looked at so far for PHP seem to generate an image out of the original PDF and scale that, which doesn't work for me, I need the contents to remain vectorized and scale with the document.
Any pointers?
probably the simples walkaround would be to generate different PDF files for different page sizes from your original web-application
I'm developing an app where the user adds items to a list. That list is stored in an array and passed to PHP with JSON.
The objective is to then create a PDF with all the values extracted from the user. The PDF is quite complicated. It includes images depending on what the user selects and the text varies depending on the images and the input data.
The first idea was to generate the pdf in php with one of those pdf libraries, but that's going to be a real hassle.
Then I thought of creating an html & css (much easier) and the convert it to PDF. But since the html & css are quite complex I don't think those pdf converters will work with this.
Then I thought I could convert the html to jpg and then to pdf.
It'll be much simpler if I could just use html but the output needs to be pdf.
What do you suggest?
Here's a post that discusses creating PDF files with PHP and the PDFLib extension.
Generate PDFs with PHP it's on sitepoint.
Or if you want to go from HTML to the PDF it looks like TCPDF might work.
You can try using FPDF
Then I thought of creating an html & css (much easier) and the convert it to PDF. But since the html & css are quite complex I don't think those pdf converters will work with this.
wkhtmltopdf to the rescue! If you are on a VPS or dedicated machine, it's probably the best (open source) HTML-to-PDF engine out there. It leverages Webkit, the rendering engine used by Google Chrome and Apple Safari, amongst others.
Otherwise, your only other options are going to involve drawing every aspect of the PDF or image yourself, "by hand" in your code.
I am working on a website in which the client wishes to have users upload background images to a printable design, crop to size, add text. Do this to multiple pages then generate a pdf of the 'book'
I am running into the following issues/questions and just need to see where I can start
Are there any PHP developer packages that can do something similar. I have seen jquery crop tools but something also for adding text to an image?
How would I keep the resolution up? If the final cropped with text image needs to be 150dpi, when cropping I am guessing I would have them working on a 72dpi image, then somehow apply the crop and changes to the large image?
If the resolution issue wasn't a big deal I would go about it this way:
Simple image upload
Use jquery to crop photo to correct dimensions
Mess around with gdlibrary and imagettftext() to get the text onto an image (page)
Use something like FPDF to create a pdf from each 'page'
Is this the right way to go about it and any thoughts on the resolution issue. Thank you for any help!
Your primary tool should be ImageMagick. ImageMagick can do the cropping, resizing, scaling, overlay text or graphics, combining images, and apply special effects. A big advantage of using a separate tool instead of PHP's image manipulation tools is that you can do the same transforms in batch through other mechanisms, or even hand the work over to another server to keep the website more responsive. And if you do want to integrate it tightly into the website, you can use the MagickWand For PHP interface.
Cropping does not change DPI, only the dimensions of the image. Scaling, on the other hand, changed both.
You should take a look at Gallery, a GPLed program with some of the functionality you're looking for, and written in PHP.
domPDF is a good tool for converting HTML to a PDF. this way you can use the image they upload as a background image, then put the text over it in any standard HTML tag.
As far as the resolution/dpi issue goes, I'm not sure if there is much you can do outside of changing the size of the image. I would recommend looking into This PHP Library, which has a lot of good tools for manipulating images.
I think with a combination of these tools, you'll be able to create HTML that can make a PDF that's fit to print, and use that.
How can I rotate a pdf document using php and linux?
Rotate an Entire PDF Document's Pages to 180 Degrees
$command = "pdftk in.pdf cat 1-endS output out.pdf";
system($command);
You could use pdf90 from PDFjam.
To address some of the other suggestions:
I would be wary of adjusting the Rotate attribute directly, as this attribute is stored as text, and '90' or '270' obviously uses a different number of bytes to '0'. I believe inserting the required bytes can make a mess of the index tables that appear at the end of a PDF file. After that, you're reliant on a viewer being able to interpret the damaged file.
Rendering the PDF to an image and rotating that is going to rasterize any text or vector graphics, leading to either a much larger file size, or much lower quality.
You would have to use a external library like this to extract the info a generate an image, then put it back to the pdf(or a new one)
EDIT:
If your going to get a Logo or a diagram this is a good choice, if its a big document with text and lots of images... its going to be pretty hard, could you edit the OP with more info on what you need?
You will have to access the PDF as a binary file then find and adjust the "Rotate" attribute for each page (and possibly the "MediaBox" attribute). I am not aware of any PDF libraries for PHP that allow for this sort of direct manipulation of existing files. This method will not require changing anything about the content of the pages, it just changes the orientation the pages are displayed in by viewers (similar to the EXIF Orientation information in JPEG images).
This snippet of perl should help illustrate what parts of the file you are looking for.
There are a few libraries for handling PDFs with PHP.
Here's a good code example using such a library. I found it, just by Googling "PHP PDF":
http://www.fpdf.org/en/script/script2.php