I have an already pre-designed PDF, and I would like to fill the PDF with some database information. So I'm curious if I should save the PDF into JPG's and render them out with the data on top of the image and re-create a PDF.
Or is there a way to use the PDF already, and print data into the PDF that is already made?
I am trying to figure out the best solution to generating this type of PDF.
All thoughts would be greatly appreciated!
You can read about PHP's PDF library here: http://php.net/manual/book.pdf.php
PHP also recommends these alternatives:
http://www.fpdf.org/
http://www.tecnick.com/public/code/cp_dpage.php?aiocp_dp=tcpdf
http://php.net/manual/book.haru.php
PDF files support the use of interactive form fields, so the best method for adding information to a PDF from a database, is add form fields to your database and find a library that let's you fill out PDF forms programatically.
Rendering a PDF to an image just to write information on it and then converting it back to a PDF would mean that no text was selectable in the new PDF unless you OCR'd it, which isn't the most optimal way to do it.
After a bit more digging, I was able to use Zend PDF within the framework to update the PDF quite easily. It was my first time using the Zend Framework, and found it quite useful. I suggest anyone trying to manipulate PDF's use Zend.
Just my .02 though. I appreciate your pointers though that were given.
Related
I've been looking for a solution to generate PDF from some data I have on a database. Currently I put it on an HTML and then print to PDF, but they asked me to save directly to PDF. These are documents that vary a lot in design, so before it was easy to change a margin or a font size, but now they asking for a direct PDF output it's more difficult, so I saw that LiveDocx is a great solution for me... but these documents are very private (illneses, income...) and my bosses don't want to send any document to a server. So I'm looking for some other solutions. The perfect workaround is doing what LiveDocx proposes (You have a template in a Docx format that you can modify whenever you want, and then you can send some data to the template to fill the gaps and of course save to PDF) but in my own server. Do you know something like this?
My platform is based on PHP+Zend Framework, so it should be compatible with that.
Thank you!!
Well instead of using LiveDocx, i found a really cool Library. mPDF an MIT Licensed library that transfers HTML Code to a pdf document. Its simple and great. Let me know if this helped you and if you need more help.
AND ontop of all that, you can write your data directly to the pdf document. You can input an html file into the pdf writer IF you want. If not then yes you can use their write function to write data directly to pdf.
I am using PHP 5.0 pdf library to convert files dynamically into PDF.
I am using this reference from the official PHP website using PDF_new(), creating its object and using PDF_set_info and PDF_get_buffer functions.
This works fine, but when I want to create PDF pages and writing the content inside of it, there is no reference given anywhere on how to convert an already existing page to PDF. Say a page in my folder bill.php with CSS too needs to be converted to PDF on the fly.
Well converting HTML to PDF is not that easy, there are several libraries out there that might fit your needs. But none has full html/css capabilities, especially not css3.
FPDF
http://www.fpdf.org
TCPDF
http://www.tcpdf.org
DOMPDF
http://code.google.com/p/dompdf/ (this class allows you to easily convert simple layouted websites to pdf. i used this class quite often with almost no problems. sadly this library does not support converting of forms to usable input fields.)
WKHTMLTOPDF
http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/ (actually a linux package but php wrappers are existing. this gives almost full html capabilities and awesome results)
html2PDF is a nice library to use. Make sure you change the default language to English though. I've used it many times to create dynamic invoices with tables and divs. Works really well.
Refer some of the articles, which may help to improve your knowledge as well as clear some of doubt of you.
Getting started
Convert HTML To PDF in PHP The Easy Way
How to Generate a PDF With PHP
Convert HTML to PDF
This HTML to PDF SDK may also help you.
Hope, it will help you.
this is what i'm trying to do. I have a Student Result Application in
which i'll like to print out a pdf format of a specially designed
Result's Sheet..
http://www.4shared.com/photo/yg8vCjYe/results_layout.html
My question is that is it possible to send all the html, css and php
variables from the final result sheet to the pdf engine, or just
design a new page result_printout.php page and implement the
pdf engine on that page.
I'll be happy your honest opinions
thanks for you help
honestly, i haven't done this before,
but i think this should help:
http://www.rustyparts.com/pdf.php
Since you allready have the HTML I would suggest to use wkhtmltopdf. There also some wrappers for PHP. It's allways a bit tricky to get it all work in the right way, especially with pagebreaks.
But I find it usually more easy to use then all the other PHP PDF creation classes/libraries.
I have only worked with MPDF and you can pretty much send all the html, css and php variables to the pdf enginge and tell the engine to either force a download or send it to the browser where the user can either save the file or print or just view it. You can also email the generated pdf.
You can read the documentation here: http://mpdf1.com/manual/
I have created new PDFs many times using Zend and PHP. But Now I have a patient form in PDF format and I have to fill that form using my application. How can I print text on existing PDF file with already have some text. Is it possible ?
Thanks
I haven't done it, but it certainly seems possible. See Zend_Pdf::load(), for example. It seems like you ought to be able to load the PDF, manipulate it, and save then save it somewhere.
Last time I had to do this, Zend_Pdf wasn't around, and I ended up using fpdf/fpdi, which was ugly but worked fine.
Does the PDF contain form fields ? If so you can use FDF type functions.
See Filling PDF Forms with PHP - there should be a solution in there somewhere.
What I am wanting to do is create a PDF ideally from HTML code. I found a class called dompdf but I'm having issues with font and page breaks.
Does anyone know of another script or even a better way in general to generate PDF files?
The reason why I am converting HTML to PDF is because I want someone to use a WYSIWYG editor to create the contents and click save to generate their PDF file...
Any input would be greatly apprecaited
Due to the different nature of PDF and HTML you'll always have to make a few comprimises when trying to convert HTML into PDF.
If this doesn't bother you too much, I'd get started with TCPDF. Its easy to use and has a fairly good grasp of colors, sizes and some other style related HTML attributes.
i use this class TCPDF :
http://www.tecnick.com/public/code/cp_dpage.php?aiocp_dp=tcpdf
If you don't mind a bit of work then you can use Cairo to generate PDFs.
You can take a look at html2fpdf. It can accept very basic html and css.