Save PDF file using PHPPdf - php

I'm using PHPPdf library to generate PDFs on the fly in my Symfony2 app. However I could not find a way to dump/write/save PDF raw data to a file.
From Symfony controller I tried this:
$content = $this->render('AcmeBundle:PDF:template.xml.twig');
file_put_contents('documents/123.pdf', $content);
but as it seems I get rendered HTML and not PDF binary data. When I add #Pdf annotation all output is being routed to PDF document and into browser but I need to save raw data instead for later retrieval.
I looked into FacadeBuilder but coudln't find anything useful.
Any help would be much appreciated...

Take a look at this, I think you should use $content = $facade->render($xml); like in the example action.

Related

CakePHP 3 CakePDF Plugin: Generating a large PDF by looping through content?

So my problems stems from trying to generate large PDF files but being hit by the memory limit / execution timeouts in PHP, the data is too great in volume to simply extend these limits so that solution is out of the question.
I have a background shell task running which handles all of this rendering and then alerts the user once the PDF has been completed.
In theory I would have a loop within this shell which would take in a chunk of data and render it to file, then take the next chunk and do the same. Once out of data to render, the file would then be written and completed ready to be served. This way the memory limit of PHP would not be hit as a manageable chunk will only ever be loaded.
I am currently using the CakePDF(v.3.5) plugin for CakePHP 3 (v.3.5.13) but am sturggling to find a solution which allows the rendering of some data and then adding more data to the same pdf.
Has anyone managed this before or is it out of scope of the plugin? Would another solution be to create multiple PDF files and then merge them together after all separate PDF's have been created?
This is more of a theoretical question if this would work and if anyone has managed it before. I don't have much code to show but if more detail is required then give me a shout and I will try and get something for you or some example code!
Thanks
I don't have direct experience with that version CakePdf, but under CakePHP 2.x I use the wkhtmltopdf engine which takes an .html output to produce the PDF.
If your shell generates such .html in chunks, it is easy to append.
Of course wkhtmltopdf is likely to put some load on the machine to produce the PDF, but since it's a binary, it happens outside of PHP's memory/time contraints.
That's certainly out of the scope of the plugin, it's built around the idea of rendering a single view to a single file, the interface doesn't support chunked creation of a single file, and if I'm not mistaken, none of the supported engines do support that either, at least not in a straightforward and efficient manner when it comes to large documents.
There's certainly lots of ways to do this, creating multiple PDFs and merging/concatenating them afterwards might be one of them, generating the source content in chunks, and passing it to a PDF renderer that can handle lots of content efficiently might be another one, and surely there also might be libraries out there that do explicitly support chunked creation of PDFs...
I thought I would post what I ended up doing for anyone in the future.
I used CakePDF to generate smaller PDF's which I stored in a tmp directory these are all under the limit of PHP's execution time and memory limits as I don't believe altering those provides a good solution. In this step I also saved the names of all of the PDF's generated for use in the next step.
The code for this looked something like:
while (!is_last_pdf) {
// Generate pdf in here with a portion of the data
$CakePdf = new CakePdf();
$CakePdf->template('page', 'default');
$CakePdf->viewVars(compact('data', 'other_stuff'));
// Save file name to array
$tmp_file_list[] = $file_name;
// Update the is_last_pdf variable
is_last_pdf = check_for_more_data();
}
From this I used GhostScript from within the Shell to merge all of the PDF files, the code for this looked something like this:
$output_path = 'output.pdf';
$file_list = '';
// Create a string of all the files to merge
foreach ($tmp_file_list as $file) {
$file_list .= $file . ' ';
}
// Execute GhostScript to merge all the files into the `output.pdf` file
exec('gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=' . $output_path . ' ' . $file_list);
All of the code here was in the Shell file responsible for creating the PDF.
Hope this helps someone :)

how to get html code from pdf,docx,doc using php

I want to convert any pdf,docx,doc file into html code using php. with same style as in pdf. I am not getting proper solution.
Config::set('pdftohtml.bin', 'C:/poppler-0.37/bin/pdftohtml.exe');
// change pdfinfo bin location
Config::set('pdfinfo.bin', 'C:/poppler-0.37/bin/pdfinfo.exe');
// initiate
$pdf = new Gufy\PdfToHtml\Pdf($item);
// convert to html and return it as [Dom Object](https://github.com/paquettg/php-html-parser)
$html = $pdf->html();
Not working for me.
I had a similar problem and i found a github that i used with word docs. It worked fairly good then but i havent tested it of late. try it.
https://github.com/benbalter/Convert-Word-Documents-to-HTML
I think that this post could help you in a first time. With this one, you'll be able to convert any pdf into HTML code using PHP.
After this, you can use the help provided by this post to convert .doc and .docx to PDF using PHP.
I think that you can now built a function for each document extension that you want to convert into HTML.
Good luck.
I've come across a web service which presents an API for converting documents. I haven't tested it very thoroughly but it does seem to produce decent results at converting Word to HTML:
https://cloudconvert.org/

Generate PDF from HTML/CSS/PHP in Symfony 1.4

I am working on a Symfony 1.4 project. I need to make a PDF download link for a (yet to be) generated voucher and I have to say, I am a bit confused. I already have the HTML/CSS for the voucher, I created the download button in the right view, but I don't know where to go from there.
Use Mpdf to create the pdf file
http://www.mpdf1.com/
+1 with wkhtmltopdf
I'd even recommand the snappy library.
If you use composer, you can even get the wkhtmltopdf binaries automatically
Having used wkhtmltopdf for a while I've moved off it as 1) it has some serious bugs and 2) ongoing development has slowed down. I moved over to PhantomJS which is proving to be much better in terms of functionality and effectiveness.
Once you've got something like wkhtmltopdf or PhantomJS on your machine you need to generate the HTML page and pass that along to it. I'll give you an example assuming you use PhantomJS.
Initially set what every request parameters you need to for the template.
$this->getRequest->setParamater([some parameter],[some value]);
Then call the function getPresentation() to generate the HTML from a template. This will return the resulting HTML for a specific module and action.
$html = sfContext::getInstance()->getController()->getPresentation([module],[action]);
You'll need to replace the relative CSS paths with a absolute CSS path in the HTML file. For example by running preg_replace.
$html_replaced = preg_replace('/"\/css/','"'.sfConfig('sf_web_dir').'/css',$html);
Now write the HTML page to file and convert to a PDF.
$fp = fopen('export.html','w+');
fwrite($fp,$html_replaced);
fclose($fp)
exec('/path/to/phantomjs/bin/phantomjs /path/to/phantomjs/examples/rasterize.js /path/to/export.html /path/to/export.pdf "A3");
Now send the PDF to the user:
$this->getResponse()->clearHttpHeaders();
$this->getResponse()->setHttpHeader('Content-Description','File Transfer');
$this->getResponse()->setHttpHeader('Cache-Control','public, must-revalidate, max-age=0');
$this->getResponse()->setHttpHeader('Pragma: public',true);
$this->getResponse()->setHttpHeader('Content-Transfer-Encoding','binary');
$this->getResponse()->setHttpHeader('Content-length',filesize('/path/to/export.pdf'));
$this->getResponse()->setContentType('application/pdf');
$this->getResponse()->setHttpHeader('Content-Disposition','attachment; filename=export.pdf');
$this->getResponse()->setContent(readfile('/path/to/export.pdf'));
$this->getResponse()->sendContent();
You do need to set the headers otherwise the browser does odd things. The filename for the generated HTML file and export should be unique to avoid the situation of two people generating PDF vouchers at the same time clashing. You can use something like sha1(time()) to add a randomised hash to a standard name e.g. 'export_'.sha1(time());
Use wkhtmltopdf, if possible. It is by far the best html2pdf converter a php coder can use.
And then do something like this (not tested, but should be pretty close):
public function executeGeneratePdf(sfWebRequest $request)
{
$this->getContext()->getResponse()->clearHttpHeaders();
$html = '*your html content*';
$pdf = new WKPDF();
$pdf->set_html($html);
$pdf->render();
$pdf->output(WKPDF::$PDF_EMBEDDED, 'whatever_name.pdf');
throw new sfStopException();
}

Webpage convert to PDF button

I have a website now and I want to create a button on it to convert this page to PDF.
Is there any code to make this happen? I cannot find it on the internet.
So I want to have a button and when I press on it it converts the page to a .PDF file.
I do not want to use a third party website to generate the PDF's. I want to use it for internal purposes to generate files with PHP. So I need the code what can make a PDF for each page.
I use wkhtmltopdf - works very well - http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/ there is a PHP wrapper
Updated based on comments below on usage :
How to use the integration class:
require_once('wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf.php'); // Ensure this path is correct !
$html = file_get_contents("http://www.google.com");
$pdf = new WKPDF();
$pdf->set_html($html);
$pdf->render();
$pdf->output(WKPDF::$PDF_EMBEDDED,'sample.pdf');
Use FPDF. It's a well-respected PDF-generating library for PHP that is written in pure PHP (so installing it should be dead simple for you).
Try this:
http://www.macronimous.com/resources/Converting_HTML2PDF_using_PHP.asp
It will convert HTML to a PDF using FPDF and HTML2PDF class.
Also found this:
http://www.phpclasses.org/package/3168-PHP-Generate-PDF-documents-from-HTML-pages.html

Is it possible to read a pdf file as a txt?

I need to find a certain key in a pdf file. As far as I know the only way to do that is to interpret a pdf as txt file. I want to do this in PHP without installing a addon/framework/etc.
Thanks
You can certainly open a PDF file as text. PDF file format is actually a collection of objects. There is a header in the first line that tells you the version. You would then go to the bottom to find the offset to the start of the xref table that tells where all the objects are located. The contents of individual objects in the file, like graphics, are often binary and compressed. The 1.7 specification can be found here.
I found this function, hope it helps.
http://community.livejournal.com/php/295413.html
You can't just open the file as it is a binary dump of objects used to create the PDF display, including encoding, fonts, text, images. I wrote an blog post explaining how text is stored at http://pdf.jpedal.org/java-pdf-blog/bid/27187/Understanding-the-PDF-file-format-text-streams
Thank you all for your help. I owe you this piece of code:
// Proceed if file exists
if(file_exists($sourcePath)){
$pdfFile = fopen($sourcePath,"rb");
$data = fread($pdfFile, filesize($sourcePath));
fclose($pdfFile);
// Check if file is encrypted or not
if(stripos($data,$searchFor)){ // $searchFor = "/Encrypt"
$counterEncrypted++;
}else{
$counterNotEncrpyted++;
}
}else{
$counterNotExisting++;
}

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