I am using php code to query to a database and the results will be used to generate a report.
If I want the report to be generated in a pdf format how should I do it ?
If you need UTF support in your PDF file, consider tcpdf library.
Download it from here: http://www.tecnick.com/public/code/cp_dpage.php?aiocp_dp=tcpdf
And in your script:
<?php
//include files
require_once($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/tcpdf/config/lang/eng.php');
require_once($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/tcpdf/tcpdf.php');
// create new PDF document
$pdf = new TCPDF(PDF_PAGE_ORIENTATION, PDF_UNIT, PDF_PAGE_FORMAT, true, 'UTF-8', false);
//add some content using class methods
//Close and output PDF document
$pdf->Output('filename.pdf', 'I');
?>
Look into html2pdf
Create your report as html and then run the code to transform into PDF. You don't need to know the language to generate the PDF blocks. Submitted forms work out cool too.
You can also use FPDF, I've used that for several projects. In the beginning you will be annoyed a lot, but when you get used to it, it will get easier to create pdf's :)
I've used TCPDF (http://www.tcpdf.org/) for my last project. It worked pretty good but the next time im going for a html to pdf converter, simply because designing the report (converting to pdf draw statements) was such a time sink.
So i would suggest http://sourceforge.net/projects/html2fpdf/
Related
I'm creating a web app that allows a canvas form to insert an image from a HTML canvas into a particular position in multiple PDF files. I had this working with python flask as a back-end but the people that I'm making it for only want it in PHP. I have tried using libraries like FPDI but they only work with PDF versions up to 1.4 while the PDF files we are using are version 1.7.
Does anyone know any possible libraries that can help me solve this issue. I would prefer not to convert the PDF files if possible.
Cheers
With TCPDF you can insert images into a PDF (v.1.7) file:
Requirements
composer require tecnickcom/tcpdf
Example
<?php
require_once __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';
$pdf = new TCPDF();
$pdf->setPDFVersion('1.7');
$pdf->setAutoPageBreak(true);
$pdf->setPrintHeader(false);
$pdf->setPrintFooter(false);
$pdf->AddPage();
// Insert image
$pdf->setJPEGQuality(100);
$pdf->image(__DIR__ . '/example.jpg', 10, 10);
// Close and output PDF document
//$pdf->output('doc.pdf', 'I');
// Save the pdf file
$content = $pdf->output('', 'S');
file_put_contents('example.pdf', $content);
We (Setasign, creator of FPDI) offer a commercial add-on that let you import PDFs which uses a compression technic that was introduced in PDF 1.5.
You may also try to downgrade these documents with an external program. I'm aware of some people using Ghostscript for this.
Generally you should know that you do not insert an image into the existing PDF but you create a completely new PDF while importing a single page into a reusable structure which you place onto a newly created page. On top of this you place the image.
With FPDI you cannot edit a PDF document.
Previously i was working with dompdf in laravel application to generate invoices.. Its taking time in generating invoices but working perfectly . Below is the code of dompdf to generate invoice by just sending the view.
PDF::setOptions(['dpi' => 150, 'defaultFont' => 'sans-serif']);
// pass view file
view()->share('account_invoice',$account_invoice);
view()->share('account_invoice_item',$account_invoice_item);
$pdf = PDF::loadView('admin/invoice/InvoiceTemplate/template');
But now i am working with FPDF. Is there anything like dompdf to pass view to generate PDF.
$pdf = new FPDF();
View::make('admin/invoice/InvoiceTemplate/template');
I know my code is incorrect for FPDF but any idea how can i pass view to FPDF to generate pdf so i can send it by attactment.
It looks like your goal is to dump raw html onto the pdf and have it be formatted accordingly? Take a look at this tutorial, it might help, but I'd actually recommend a different approach.
Basically, fpdf is has no html writer built in, at least none as far as I'm aware. So I'd recommend a pdf writer with better out of the box support for your needs. Take a look at Snappy and wkhtmltopdf. With Snappy and wkhtmltopdf you can pretty easily generate pdfs on the fly by passing it html, as you're attempting to in your examples.
<?php
use Knp\Snappy\Pdf;
$snappy = new Pdf('/path/to/wkhtmltopdf');
$snappy->generateFromHtml(View::make('admin/invoice/InvoiceTemplate/template'), '/tmp/invoice.pdf');
I am using tcpdf library to create pdf report from php and i have many tables to write on pdf report.
I want to use a css style upon some of table rows but internal css not working on it, that's why I am force to use inline style but it is so much time taking.
So anyone please give some trick if I can use internal css style script to use for all required table rows once.
Use following code for library:
// Include the main TCPDF library (search for installation path).
require_once('tcpdf_include.php');
and set the following parameters for object definition
// create new PDF document
$pdf = new TCPDF(PDF_PAGE_ORIENTATION, PDF_UNIT, PDF_PAGE_FORMAT, true, 'UTF-8', false);
It will work.
For detail description for tcpdf library you can refer URL:
http://www.tcpdf.org/examples.php
All the Best
I have been looking and testing this for a couple days now and was wondering if anyone could point me in a different direction. I have a very long job application HTML form (jobapp.html) and a matching PDF (jobpdf.pdf) that have the same field names for all entries in both the HTML form and the PDF. I need to take the user data that is entered in the form and convert it to a PDF. This is what I have gathered so far but don't know if I am on track:
Is pdftk the only viable 3rd party app to accomplish this?
Using pdftk would i take the $_POST data collected for the user and generate a .fdf(user.fdf) then flatten the .fdf on the .pdf(job.pdf). So irreguarless of where the fields are located on each document the information on the fdf would populate the pdf by field names?
I have been trying
http://koivi.com/fill-pdf-form-fields/tutorial.php
I have also looked at "Submit HTML form to PDF"
I have used fpdf several times to create php-based pdf documents. An example following:
require('fpdf.php');
$pdf = new FPDF();
$pdf->AddFont('georgia', '', 'georgia.php');
$pdf->AddFont('georgia', 'B', 'georgiab.php');
$pdf->AddFont('georgia', 'I', 'georgiai.php');
# Add UTF-8 support (only add a Unicode font)
$pdf->AddFont('freesans', '', 'freesans.php', true);
$pdf->SetFont('freesans', '', 12);
$pdf->SetTitle('My title');
$pdf->SetAuthor('My author');
$pdf->SetDisplayMode('fullpage', 'single');
$pdf->SetLeftMargin(20);
$pdf->SetRightMargin(20);
$pdf->AddPage();
$pdf->Cell(40,10,'Hello World!');
$pdf->Output();
You can learn very fast with these tutorials from the website itself.
EDIT: Example to save form data: (yes, is very easy...)
require('fpdf.php');
$pdf = new FPDF();
$pdf->AddPage();
foreach ($_POST as $key =>$data)
{
$pdf->Write(5, "$key: $data"); //write
$pdf->Ln(10); // new line
}
$pdf->Output($path_to_file . 'file.txt','F'); // save to file
Look at these pages created with fpdf, really!
http://www.fpdf.org/
That would be the library to do it. I used it here to add images to a form and submit it to create a PDF with those images: http://productionlocations.com/locations
The actual code to do it is pretty complex.
I have found PrinceXML very easy to use. It takes your HTML/XML, applies CSS, and converts it into a PDF. The PHP extensions work very well. Unfortunately, it's not free.
One way you can consider is using an online API that converts any HTML to PDF. You can send them a generated HTML (easier to produce) that will contains your user's submitted data, and receive back a high fidelity PDF.
There are quite a few services available on the market. I like to mention PDFShift because it offers a package in PHP that simplifies the work for you.
Once you've installed it (using Composer, or downloaded it directly, depending on your choices) you can quickly convert an HTML document like this:
require_once('vendor/autoload.php');
use \PDFShift\PDFShift;
PDFShift::setApiKey('{your api key}');
PDFShift::convertTo('https://link/to/your/html', null, 'invoice.pdf');
And that's it. There are quite a few features you can implement (accessing secured documents, adding a watermark, and more).
Hope that helps!
In a web app developed in PHP we are generating Quotations and Invoices (which are very simple and of single page) using TCPDF lib.
The lib is working just great but it seems to generate very large PDF files. For example in our case it is generating PDF files as large as 4 MB (+/- a few KB).
How to reduce this bloating of PDF files generated by TCPDF?
Here is code snippet that I am using
ob_start();
include('quote_view_bag_pdf.php'); //This file is valid HTML file with PHP code to insert data from DB
$quote = ob_get_contents(); //Capture the content of 'quote_view_bag_pdf.php' file and store in variable
ob_end_clean();
//Code to generate PDF file for this Quote
//This line is to fix a few errors in tcpdf
$k_path_url='';
require_once('tcpdf/config/lang/eng.php');
require_once('tcpdf/tcpdf.php');
// create new PDF document
$pdf = new TCPDF();
// remove default header/footer
$pdf->setPrintHeader(false);
$pdf->setPrintFooter(false);
// add a page
$pdf->AddPage();
// print html formated text
$pdf->writeHtml($quote, true, 0, true, 0); //Insert Variables contents here.
//Build Out File Name
$pdf_out_file = "pdf/Quote_".$_POST['quote_id']."_.pdf";
//Close and output PDF document
$pdf->Output($pdf_out_file, 'F');
$pdf->Output($pdf_out_file, 'I');
///////////////
enter code here
Hope this code fragment will give some idea?
You need to see what it is putting inside the PDF. Is it embedding lots of images or fonts?
You can examine the contents with lots of PDFtools. If you have Acrobat 9.0, there is a blog article showing how to do this at http://pdf.jpedal.org/java-pdf-blog/bid/10479/Viewing-PDF-objects
Finally I have managed to solve the problem.
The problem was that by mistake I had inserted a link to email id in the web page that was getting rendered to PDF. By just removing this link the size of the generated PDF went down to just 260 kb!
Thanks everyone who tried to help me out in solving this problem.
Current TCPDF version now includes font subsetting by default to dramatically reduce PDF size.
Check the TCPDF website at http://www.tcpdf.org and consult the official forum for further information.