What I'd like to do
I'd like to allow a user to download a dynamically generated pdf file (certificate). I was thinking of creating a pdf template and just write the user's name on it with PHP, that's the only thing that will be dynamic about this.
How I'd like to do it
Since the application is for a client and I have no idea on what server will he use it I'd like to know if there are ways of achieving this without any extra extensions or whatsoever to be installed on the server. I can assume he has PHP > 5.
Basically read the template pdf and write a string to it then save it to be able to offer for download, all this with PHP?
doing this with pure php on your own will get very messy, so i recommend using FPDF in combination with FPDI (to open your templates). both can easily be added to your projects sources, so you don't need to install any extensions (unless you want to compress your PDFs - in that case you'll need zlib installed).
Related
We want to merge a lot of PDF files into one big file and send it to the client. However, the resources on our production server are very restricted, so merging all files in memory first and then sending the finished PDF file results in our script being killed because it exhausts its available memory.
The only solution (besides getting a better server, obviously) would be starting to stream the PDF file before it is fully created to bypass the memory limit.
However I wonder if that is even possible. Can PDF files be streamed before they're fully created? Or doesn't the PDF file format allow streaming unfinished files because some headers or whatever have to be set after the full contents are certain?
If it is possible, which PDF library supports creating a file as a stream? Most libraries that I know of (like TCPDF) seem to create the full file in memory and then in the end output this finished result somewhere (i. e. via the $tcpdf->Output() method).
The PDF file format is entirely able to be streamed. There's certainly nothing that'll prevent it anyway.
As an example, we recently had a customer that required reading a single page over a HTTP connection to a remote PDF, without downloading or reading the whole PDF. We're able to do this by making many small HTTP requests for specific content within the PDF. We use the trailer at the end of the PDF and the cross reference table to find the required content without having to parse the whole PDF.
If I understand your problem, it looks like your current library you're using loads each PDF in memory before creating or streaming out the merged document.
If we look at this problem a different way, the better solution would be for the PDF library to only take references to the PDFs to be merged, then when the merged PDF is being created or streamed, pull in the content and resources from the PDFs to be merged, as-and-when required.
I'm not sure how many PHP libraries there are that can do this as I'm not too up-to-date with PHP, but I know there are probably a few C/C++ libraries that may be able to do this. I understand PHP can use extensions to call these libraries. Only downside is that they'll likely have commercial licenses.
Disclaimer: I work for the Mako SDK R&D group, hence why I know for sure there are some libraries which will do this. :)
What is, according to you, the best way to convert uploaded files of any kind (.doc, .docx,...) into a pdf-file using nothing but php. Is it even possible to do so?
I looked at FPDF, but this creates the pdf files from text.
An other solution previously given was to use the PDFlib library on your server, but unfortunately, my server doesn't support this library...
What is the best way to convert to files my users upload on my site to pdf files?
A simpler approach would be to restrict uploads to .PDF format programmatically and require your users to only upload .pdf files. Provide a link on the upload page to a free and open source pdf printer (e.g. Cuteftp) that the user can install to create .pdf documents from any file that can be printed.
Trying to do it through PHP will be problematic because the uploads could be generated from many different programs that would be impossible to cater for in their entirety. e.g. How would it handle Scribus or ABC Flowcharter or any other 'non-standard' application someone used to create a document?
Much better to filter the upload upfront.
The best server-side PDF generator from those I tried was, so far, wkhtmltopdf, a WebKit-based, self-contained invisible browser that can render any HTML+CSS and generate a PDF from it. Reasonably fast and fairly reliable, has some useful PDF options, such as page size, orientation, etc.
The second part of the job in your case is to convert documents to HTML prior to feeding them to wkhtmltopdf. If possible, have your users upload the docs in HTML (Word and Co. can export (crappy) HTML). If this is not an option, you will have to find a tool just for that, which, in my opinion, is much easier than finding a tool that converts Word docs directly into PDF.
Good thing about wkhtmltopdf is also that you can feed the output of your PHP script to it using the ob_xxx() functions.
PHP Excel best simple way to create doc, docx, xls, xlsx, pdf files with PHP. Its lot easier with clear documentation.
Use Microsoft Office to render Microsoft Office documents, if you care about accuracy at all. This is easily done by invoking Office over COM.
Get access to your server, and install what you need. Doing so would be far easier than monkeying around with sub-par solutions.
Well... I can think of one way of doing it quite easily, but it doesn't involve using PHP.
Upload your documents to a folder on your server, that are browsable by your users.
EG: http://mysite.com/docs/
Then get your users to install a virtual printer driver such as Primo PDF
http://www.primopdf.com/index.aspx
then they can load the document into their browser, and print to PDF for offline browsing.
If this is not an option, and your dealing with office documents that conform to the openXML standard, you could attempt to parse the XML doc into a PHP page for display in the browser, then use JavaScript to trigger a print.
Unfortunately, it does still depend on your user having a PDF printer installed.
Alternatively, you could just load the docs natively, and print to your own PDF printer, then upload the PDF's to the web server for download.
I can't think of any easy way of doing this otherwise, without installing all sorts of different document parser tool-kits and doing a huge amount of behind the scenes work.
i am building a simple system using PHP that allow people to Add, Delete, and View data.
Can anyone tell me how to view the uploaded data in PDF format?
There are a bunch of options. The ones I like are:
wkhtml2pdf - A command-line tool that uses the WebKit HTML rendering engine to generate PDFs from HTML docs. Very easy to use, assuming you're able to get it installed on your server, and your requirements aren't too stringent. You just generate HTML/CSS, and use PHP's shell-exec functions to run it, and voila.
Zend_Pdf - Part of the Zend Framework, but like almost all ZF components, you can use it stand-alone. Programmatically build PDFs.
tcpdf, fpdf (with fpdi if you want to import existing PDFs and write over the top of them) - older, uglier, but effective.
There's also the commercial PDFLib, which used to be the best thing around, but I don't remember much about it. Included for approximate completeness.
Take a look at PDFLib, or its deprecated predecessor.
hey all,
is there any way to convert a given file (this could be of any type) in to a pdf file in .net or php?
eg: suppose there is a upload link to upload your file of any type(word,excel,autocad,images..) and once the upload button is clicked the uploaded file should be converted into a pdf.
i checked out fpdf.but according to my knowledge all file types cannot be converted.a module to plugin to the CMS would also be fine.
FPDF does support images. I know because I have used it recently.
If you are wanting a pure PHP solution, you can use the PHP COM functions along with Word or Excel on the server to open up those files then copy the data out.
If I were you though, I would use Google. Load the doc into Google Docs then export it as a new format with the API.
There are a couple of 3rd party solutions available such as this one, which is optimised for use on the server and accessible from any web services capable environment, including .net. Supports loads of file types including MS-Office based documents.
Disclaimer, I worked on this product so consider me biased. Having said that, it works very well.
I need to include pdf files in some webpages, and I'm gettin' in troubles.
The app is a simple newspaper's archive, in which i can read right on page or download as pdf files, one file per page. What my customer can provide me is one pdf file for each page; what my customer wants from me is to navigate them in indexes (with page thumbnail) and have a read from a choosen one direcly in page; I'm using php/mysql.
I started trying out to use the <object> tag with type="application/pdf", but i found it's deprecate 'cause it's not crossplatform at all (there's no support on linux's browsers, but even my windows' firefox 3.5 couldn't show me anything).
I guessed I could transform that pdf in something different (html or simply images are good enough), but the only thing i found is ImageMagick, that I cannot use as I must install on server and I can't, as I'm not admin of that machine.
So, I'm finally looking for suggestions
Thanks
Display the pdf inline using an IFRAME. The thumbnail you can generate with imageMagik. You should be able to use the command line version of ImageMagik to resize and convert to jpg.
edit
Your best bet is to talk to the server admin and have them install php support for ImageMagik then you can use it as a class.
If you can't get support to install on the server, you will have to use the command line version.
You might be able to Google around for a library that wraps the command line, but it would be trivial to write it yourself.
With this in place you can create a large readable black and white png for each page. It should click through to the pdf.