I am working on developing a shipping/receiving system which I plan to setup on an intranet. I have experience with HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, JQuery, and AJAX. My basic goal is to be able to scan barcodes and then generate and save PDF's for printing and storage that can be 1 page or 100 pages. I basically want to create a header with order information such as Order ID, Customer/Vender, Date, Page Number, etc. with columns below containing information like Part Number, QTY, Description, etc.
I am not sure if the entire pages can be created with css and 'foreach variables' or if perhaps a template where text is simply placed on top of a default pdf would work best? In the past I have been able to take a basic template and enter text onto a single page pdf at a specific X and Y co-ordinate, but I am not sure about detecting page breaks and the such.
Any advice on where to begin would be greatly appreciate!
Thanks in advance :)
Take a look at FPDF, it's a quite powerful PHP library for creating PDF:s. I've used it quite a lot and I'm sure it would fit your needs.
I don't think it's necessary to have a template upon which you position text. You could for example use the table capability provided by third party scripts in FDPF for presenting your data.
Using a solution such as wkhtmltopdf which is a HTML to PDF converter, you can generate the html for the invoice using php and output the PDF file using the tool. On an Ubuntu box you can simply install it using sudo apt-get install wkhtmltopdf. wkhtmltopdf is a commandline tool so you might have a cron running in the background which picks up html files within a folder and converts them to PDF using the tool or using php exec() or system() functions to execute the program. Hope that helps
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This is just a speculative idea for a client who has a lot of PDF files.
Algolia say in their FAQs that to search PDF files you first need to extract the text from the file. How would you go about this?
The way I envisage the a system working would be:
Client uploads PDF via CMS
CMS calls some service / program to
extract the text
Algolia indexes the extracted and it's somehow
linked to the original PDF
It would need to be an automated system as the client shouldn't have to tell it to index.
It would be built in PHP, probably Laravel running on Ubuntu.
What software / service could do the text extraction from the PDFs and is any magic needed to 'link' this with the PDF file?
I'm also happy to have suggestions on other search services which may handle this.
Fortunately, text extraction from pdf's is a subject that has been covered multiple times. On the command line, you could use pdftotext (available on Linux or Mac) or in your code a library as Apache Tika (for which you can find a PHP wrapper).
To avoid having too much noise in your records, I'd recommend you to then split the text and create one record per paragraph. You can then use Algolia's distinct feature to deduplicate the results.
You should already have the links to your files somewhere, just store them in your records and then, in your front-end you'll easily be able to create links to them using for instance autocomplete.js or instantsearch.js .
For anyone still looking for a solution, I put together a GitHub repository that does exactly that: https://github.com/PDFTron/pdftron-document-search.
The text extraction happens client-side as the user uploads the document using React + Firebase + Algolia.
You can check out a quick video walking you through the sample app: https://youtu.be/IQATnzHTp7Q.
Let me know if you have any questions.
I am working on improving a daily tasks which could be sped up if what I need exists. It could save me about 2 hours of work a day if it can be done. My current way of generating reports is long. Here is my current flow.
I click generate report and the report is automatically generated using PHP, CSS, & HTML.
I work on a Mac, so in order to save the report as a PDF, I click on "print". The print window appears and I then click on "Save As PDF".
I save this report to my desktop. I then upload it to my server.
The 3 steps above is my current process. What I would like to be able to do is this:
I click generate report and the report is automatically generated using PHP, CSS, & HTML.
If the report looks good, I click on "save". The save button will automatically generate a PDF and will upload it to my server.
Is this possible? If so, can someone point me in the right direction. I prefer to do this with PHP, but if there's another way I can do this, that is fine as well.
If you'd like to learn how to do this, and well, there are great resources available to you.
In fact, Welling/Thomson's PHP and MySQL Web Development has two chapters that are perfect you. Chapter 19 deals with files and Chapter 32 is entitled "Generating Personalized PDF Documents." I recommend you give it a thorough read.
If you encounter problems along the way, then you should come back here and post them in discrete components.
you could use MPDF, a great tool to generate pdfs.
check: http://www.mpdf1.com/mpdf/ download the pack and check the examples. :D sorry about the english
PHP doesn't have a built-in PDF generator, although there are libraries you can add that will do it. Creating the PDF by outputting the correct formatting is non-trivial.
Instead, you can use an HTML to PDF converter - I've used them on Linux, such as wkhtmltopdf, so they should work okay on a Mac, too. You would just generate the report as normal, but output it to a file rather than the browser. Then run the converter on the HTML and presto, a PDF version.
I want to generate PDF from a PHP file that includes HTML controls like textbox, and textarea. I attached CSS in the same. I tried FPDF, DOMPDF and TCPDF, but still I don't get exactly what I want. How do I pass HTML controls with PHP variables and CSS to these libraries?
mpdf is another option that you could try.
EDIT :
Found another solution for it, TCPDF is a FLOSS PHP class for generating PDF documents. Looks more dominating library.
"PRINCEXML" is a good library (not completely free now).
Others:
If your meaning is to create a PDF file from PHP, pdflib will help you (as some other suggested).
Else, if you want to convert an HTML page in PDF via PHP, you'll find
a little trouble outta here.. For three years I have been trying to do it as best as I
can.
So, the options I know are:
HTML2PS: same of DOMPDF, but this one convert first in .ps
(Ghostscript), then, in whatever format you need (PDF, JPEG, PNG). For
me it is a little better than dompdf, but I have the same speed problem.. Oh,
it has better compatibility with CSS.
Those two are PHP classes, but if you can install some software on the
server, and access it through passthru() or system(), have a look at
these too:
wkhtmltopdf: based on webkit (safari's wrapper), is really fast and
powerful... It seem like it is the best one (atm) for converting HTML pages to PDF on the fly, taking only two seconds for a three pages XHTML document
with CSS 2. It is a recent project. Anyway, the Google Code page is often
updated.
htmldoc: this one is a tank, it really never stops orcrashes... The project
seems to have died in 2007, but anyway if you don't need CSS compatibility
this can be nice for you.
** Thumbs Up For Strae.
If I understand your needs correctly I don't think any PHP-PDF class would do that.
Mostly you could insert only text and images to a PDF file, so if you would want something that looks like an HTML element you would need to insert it as an image.
Usually just putting HTML doesn't mean all your elements would stay intact in the PDF . (Different world, after all)
http://www.fpdf.org/ is the site having a great HTML-to-PDF class which work well. I am using it, but you have to first study its functionality and then start.
I am trying to generate a pdf from a web page which has pictures and swf files.
Final pdf should have pictures (swf should be converted into image, last frame is sufficient).
I am able to generate pdf when only images are there but i am stuck in creating pdf when the web page has swf files.
I've used wkhtmltopdf before to render pdfs programatically from web sites. I'm not sure if it'll cope with swf but it may do since it uses a version of webkit compiled in to qt.
You might be able to use wkhtmltopdf --enable-plugins. But according to this bugreport it might not work http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/issues/detail?id=48 with the flash plugin (Java however does!).
Another option is running a browser in headless mode, or on a virtual X. Firefox3 works supposedly if you use the extension "CommandLinePrint".
Xvfb :2 -screen 0 1600x1200x24 &
firefox --display=localhost:2.0 -print http://flashgames.com -printmode pdf -printfile '/tmp/test.pdf'
Infos stolen from http://spielwiese.la-evento.com/xelasblog/archives/31-Headless-Firefox-als-HTML-to-PDF.html (in German however).
But there are a few more guides like this ("headless browser, HTML to PDF"). I would totally link to one of the dupes here on Stackoverflow. But I'm too lazy to search right now.
Since you are wanting to output the target page as a PDF I would look at using .rdlc (Report Definition Language Client). It is part of the Microsoft.Reporting namespace and is designed to work with asp.net. It is freely usable and redistributable.
In many cases the layout of a web page is not "printer friendly". By using this technique you can re-arrange the layout and spacing of the PDF output to a presentation that is more printer friendly.
This will not "directly" convert your page to a PDF, but rather allow you to adapt your page layout and data to a dataset and use that to build a report. That report can then be output programmatically at runtime using the reportviewer control. If this approach interests you, let me know and I will be glad to provide more help getting you through setting it up and using.
We currently use PDForm to grab a blank pdf file (no values, just form fields and text) and list the form fields. We then query our database for the values which match those field names and create a pdf file with the newly populated data which the user can download from our site. The thing is PDForm is about $5,000 per machine and we are migrating servers. We want an alternative which is actively supported and recommended by the community.
I know Zend is working on a PDF manipulation extension, but we need something quick. I have done testing with PDFtk but the last update for that project was in 2006 and it now seems dead. It would be fine as it is open source, however it seems to be causing errors with certain files that seem to be generated with PDFPenPro (our pdf form creator).
Another solution I thought up was why not just use iText and write a java wrapper which accepts command line input, so that PHP can call it with passthru() or exec(). There are other applications that will work should we completely rewrite our code but we do not want to do that.
What we need.
The ability for PHP to receive the PDF form field names.
PHP to then either create and FDF file (then merge it with the PDF) or send a string to a command line application which will populate the fields with values from our database.
The user can then download the newly created PDF file with the populated form fields.
Am I moving in the write direction by creating a java command line application that will use iText to parse and create the PDF files specified by PHP or does anyone know of any cost effective alternatives?
TCPDF seems to have the most robust feature set that I have seen so far.
Thanks, d2burke, for the tip on TCPDF. I'm not trying to do quite as much as the OP, but the software packages available to accomplish any kind of pdf generation are in the $2k to $3k range. TCPDF is php based, open source and the guy developing it is very supportive.
Always donate to these guys! Where in the world would web development be without it?
So since none of the above solutions would work since TCPDF doesn't work with forms the way we are wanting and since PDFlib converts the form fields to blocks we decided to create a command line wrapper for iText which will grab the form field names from the PDF and then populate them based on the database values.
I don't know if another product whose license costs range from $1k -> $3k could be considered "cost effective", but PDFlib work quite nicely. And if you don't need the PPS functionality, it does get cheaper.