I have been scouting the web for a pdf editing tool for quite some time now. And it would therefore be nice with some suggestions/recommendations to the problem.
I have read a bunch of other topics around StackOverflow, but havent quite been able to find a full solution yet.
The case: I have an application written in php/javascript on a linux server and recently it has become a requirement for my customers that they are able to edit Pdf documents direct in the browser. The functions i need are primarily the ability to make annotations and to draw on the PDF. That means. They load an already uploaded PDF-document and edits it and then saves it in PDF-format again. All done within the browser.
The second requirement is that the program must save pdf document in PDF-format again, since i have an Ipad app with all of this functionality, and i need them to play nicely together. It is therefore not an option to save an image of html of something like that.
I read a comment suggesting the Zend framework, and it did sound quite useful. However i have developed my own platform from the ground, and therefore my second question is, if it is possible to embed only the PDF-tool from Zend or something?
Thank you in advance.
ps. If i missed a simular subject that answers exactly this, please let me know and i'll delete again.
There are several libraries that can be used to edit PDF-files. To name a few: Tcpdf, fpdf and Zend_Pdf.
The later can be used even without the complete ZendFramework. But be cautious: Currently it only allows editing of PDF-Files up to version 1.4.
If you need speed you should also have a look at the PDFlib which could be tweaked to support your usecase
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Is there any PHP PDF library that can replace placeholder variables in an existing PDF, ODT or DOCX document, and generate a PDF file as the end result, without screwing up the layout?
Requirements:
Needs no 3rd party web service
Ability to run on shared web hosting would be ideal (no binary installations / packages required)
Mind you, a library that is able to load an existing PDF file and insert text programmatically at a specific position is not enough for my use case.
As far as my research shows, there is no library that can do this:
TCPDF can only generate documents from scratch
FPDI can read existing PDF templates, but can only add contents programmatically (no template variable replacement)
There are various DOCX/ODT template libraries out there but they don't output PDF
PHPDOCx claims to be able to do exactly what I need - but they don't offer a trial version and I'm not going to buy a cat in a bag, especially not when there seems to be no other product on the web that does this. I find it hard to believe they can do this without problems - if you have successfully done this using the product, please drop a line here.
Am I overlooking something?
Is there a way to do this using PDF forms? I am creating the source documents in OpenOffice 3.
I may be able to use standard Linux commands (pdftk is available for example, trying that out right now.)
Update: *Argh!* I was called out of the office and the bounty expired in the meantime. Starting a new bounty: As far as my testing shows, no solution works for me perfectly yet.
Update II: I will be looking the pdftk approach soon, but I am also starting another bounty for one more round of collecting additional input. This question has now seen 1300 rep points in bounties, must be some kind of a record :)
This is not very practical, but for completeness: If you already have an ODT template, then you might very well retain that as template. Modifying the OpenDocument content.xml and replacing placeholders therein is pretty simple. If so, you could use unoconv or pyodconverter to transform the ODT into a final PDF.
unoconv -f pdf -o final.pdf template.odt
Very obviously this requires a full OpenOffice setup (UNO and Writer) on the webserver. And obviously not every webhoster would go with that! haha. Even if it's simple on any Debian or Fedora setup. The execution speed would probably not be stellar either. But then it might be the cleanest approach, since OOo governs both formats way better than any PHP class ever could.
Pekka,
I looked in to this previously, I think you can use pdftk (a command line utility), to fill in a PDF form using FDF/XFDF data files, which you could easily generate from within PHP. That was the best option I've seen so far, though there may well be a native library.
pdftk is quite useful in general, worth having a look at.
Update: Have a look here: http://php.net/manual/en/book.fdf.php
Have you considered using something like XSL:Formatting Objects (XSL:FO)? Basically they're XML documents that are processed and turned into PDFs. Doing string - or better, DOM - replacements within that should be pretty simple. It supports embedding images, links, annotations, etc.
It's not PHP but there are a number of PHP wrappers for it along with ways of using it via exec, etc. Not an ideal but it takes care of the template portion completely. For some more info: http://techportal.inviqa.com/2009/12/16/transforming-xml-with-php-and-xsl/
There's an implementation available as an Apache project - http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/
fpdf and there is another extention on top of it, which I can't remember, which allows you to import templates
Your best bet would be to generate the entire document on the fly, with the template defined programatically using fpdf or something similar. That way, your text will not be cut off by paragraphs or anything like that, and you can easily position images/other elements as required.
Late, but you can use OpenSource template designer https://github.com/applicius/dhek/releases , to define pkaceholders/areas over any existing PDF, then load it in PHP (as it's JSON format) and write accordingly on original PDF using fpdf lib, to generate custom PDF with dynamic data written on.
Altough not exactly thing you asked, you may consider to make it at two steps: using some php templating sytem (smarty, dwoo) to generate html page and then using tools like Html2Pdf convert it to pdf. I am using it, and results are good (no problems with page layout etc)
Of course it depends of your input documents (can you use html instead of PDF/ ODT as source ) and complexity of the layout of those.
Ok I'm trying to help you solve the problem a little.
First the answer for couple of your question.
Q - Am I overlooking something?
A - No. There is a PHP PDF library that can replace placeholder variables in an existing PDF and generate a PDF file as the end result, without screwing up the layout
Q - Is there a way to do this using PDF forms?
A - Yes. absolutelly the tric to doing this is by using a PDF Forms
For both answer you can use Justin Koivisto fill pdf form field php library.
For more detail you please go to http://koivi.com/fill-pdf-form-fields/tutorial.php.
Take a look there for additional information.
Credit to Justin Koivisto for his work
P.S
For workaround for displaying a table like output from pdf form
please consider to take some reading on Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher User's Guide - Creating a PDF Template
I'll add this new answer since the FDF PHP extension is now dead.
I've just followed these instructions and ended up executing one perl script then the pdftk command
I'm pretty aware it's far from being a real PHP solution but it's reliable and fairly easy to implement on any *nix platform.
The tools described there are also available on Debian, just in case you were wondering.
It's a litte bit late but have a look at the PDFTemplate Library it does exatly what you want. You can create Open Document files (odt) and add placeholders in it. The PDFTemplate library can fill out these placeholders (even with images) and create a PDF file.
ODT Files with placeholders to PDF
Don't you think the TCPDF solution force you to reivent the wheel, in term of layout rendering?
I think TCPDF doesn't allow a good separation of concerns, and is just too limited when you try to render dynamic tables, or wide portions of text.
I'm pretty interested in alternative solutions like wkhtml2pdf or XSL-FOP, but I would like some experience feedback.
Thanks in advance.
I used FOP and Jasper Reports over the last years. Both are Java-Solutions but can be easily used within a PHP application. For that I use a PHP/Java-Bridge (at the moment the one from the ZendServer CE, but there is also a Open-Source-Bridge at Sourceforge)
For me JasperReports works better. There is a graphical WYSIWYG-Editor (iReport) for creating the Templates. FOP is great too but writing the XSL by hand is difficult and lengtly.
I haven't tried the two pdf generators that you mentioned, i'll give them a shoot...
I used TCPDF and it worked good for me... It allows easily to turn html code to a pdf file...
The drawbacks is that the translation is not always perfect, specially when you use css styles.
Another drawback could be the heavy weight of the library...
I am developing a new project in CodeIgniter (CI), and would like to find a CI solution to this current issue. I've got one image, which resembles a picture frame. I would like for uploaded images to be modified to have this frame in their background.
Example:
alt text http://www.sampsonresume.com/projects/visit-creation/vc-process.jpg
The first picture is the frame. The second is the uploaded image (after resizing/cropping), and the third is the combination of both, which I would like to accomplish.
If the images are going to be shown on your own website, it would probably be easier to simply use CSS (especially if your bottom image simply gives a border...). Of course, if you want people to be downloading these files with the frame, that's a different story.
I don't think CI has a built in method in the Image Manipulation class. But, that class is simply abstracts typically-used features from one of the three major PHP image libraries (GD, ImageMagick, and NetPBM). If you know what library you are using (I normally use GD for basic things like this...), then you'll just have to use their proprietary ways of doing this stuff.
You can even make your own library or extend the Image Manipulation class to add your own special features.
Also, there may be ways to do this in Zend (not sure, I'm not going to look it up either). But, there are easy ways to include Zend components into CI if you do find something.
Good luck man!
Agreed with Kyle -- your best bet is to extend the libraries already there. Take a look at ImageMagick "composite" command.
composite -gravity center smile.gif rose: rose-over.png
http://www.imagemagick.org/script/composite.php
I have a PDF document with some external links.
I'd like to parse the document, replace the destination of the links then close (and serve) the PDF document, all using PHP
I know I can do this with PDFLib but I don't want to incur this cost.
I could re-write the document with FPDF or DomPDF, but some of these PDFs are quite complex so this would be a major time investment.
Surely there must be a way to do this directly to PDF docs, using native PHP?
TIA
I don't think there is a text/hyperlink changer class for PHP. The closest products, like pdftk, only does higher-level stuff like merging, splitting and applying watermarks.
Changing a pdf is much more difficult than generating it, so you need to use a pdf editor like Nitro PDF (untested), or why not Acrobat/Illustrator/InDesign.
If you must use PHP, regenerating the PDF:s with one of the free classes seems to be your best choice. I like FPDF very much, it gets my recommendation. If you decide to use it, check out FPDI as well, it can use existing PDF files as a template, maybe it will help you. Good luck!