How do I convert a PDF file to HTML in PHP? Is there any lib or web service? I mean free, thanks!
Google pdf2html, pdftohtml looks to be the only viable one. and it's based on a command line program, not PHP. so it may not be useful to you. Google is capable of converting, so there may be a way to do it with GDocs as well. though I'm not sure of that. At any rate, I hope this gets you on the proper path at least.
I've tried Poppler's pdftohtml command to convert PDF files to HTML files. Check it out on The HTML file output of Poppler is lighter when used but the output is not very accurate.
If you want accurate output you should use pdf2htmlEX I've converted complicated PDF files and got the best HTML output.
You can't.
PDFs are complex documents containing embedded fonts, vector graphics and layout information that cannot be represented in HTML in an automated way. You may be able to extract the TEXT of the document, but that's about it.
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is there any way how to covert PDF to HTML? I need a text from the file and when I tried PDFtoText library, I got the text, but unsorted and without any rules for parsing.
I noticed, that some PDFtoHTML online services works great with the file. So, any tips please? Here is the PDF file and I need only one specific row in the right column.
Try integrating the PDFtoHTML from the poppler project; that should support table recognition.
pdftohtml works fine : fast, stable but the html result is ugly at best. I have used it for quite some time for a web site that has many job resumes.
It is a good solution for extracting textual content however.
I would give the scribd API a try
http://www.scribd.com/developers/api
or the google apps document API. GOogle does a great job a displaying and converting pdf files
I'm developing an app where the user adds items to a list. That list is stored in an array and passed to PHP with JSON.
The objective is to then create a PDF with all the values extracted from the user. The PDF is quite complicated. It includes images depending on what the user selects and the text varies depending on the images and the input data.
The first idea was to generate the pdf in php with one of those pdf libraries, but that's going to be a real hassle.
Then I thought of creating an html & css (much easier) and the convert it to PDF. But since the html & css are quite complex I don't think those pdf converters will work with this.
Then I thought I could convert the html to jpg and then to pdf.
It'll be much simpler if I could just use html but the output needs to be pdf.
What do you suggest?
Here's a post that discusses creating PDF files with PHP and the PDFLib extension.
Generate PDFs with PHP it's on sitepoint.
Or if you want to go from HTML to the PDF it looks like TCPDF might work.
You can try using FPDF
Then I thought of creating an html & css (much easier) and the convert it to PDF. But since the html & css are quite complex I don't think those pdf converters will work with this.
wkhtmltopdf to the rescue! If you are on a VPS or dedicated machine, it's probably the best (open source) HTML-to-PDF engine out there. It leverages Webkit, the rendering engine used by Google Chrome and Apple Safari, amongst others.
Otherwise, your only other options are going to involve drawing every aspect of the PDF or image yourself, "by hand" in your code.
Could you please tell me how to extract content from PDF document using PHP? Formatting is the main problem im facing here. So let me know, if there are some ways to extract content with the same format and to display it on an online text editor.
Thanks
Have a look at XPDF
I suppose you could do
$text = shell_exec("pdftotext $pdffile");
As for displaying it in an editor? Well, which editor?
To retain some type of formatting information, and assuming by web editor you mean HTML editor, you can convert it to HTML. Perhaps there are other tools available, but since i use xpdf i came across this converter that is based on xpdf.
Basic usage
pdftohtml -noframes -c test.pdf test.html
To get it into your favorite editor
echo file_get_contents('test.html');
You may need to wrap things inside PHP functions/classes. And you may want to add security measures and whatnot.
As far as I can see, it is not possible to convert a PDF to editable HTML using PHP on the fly, while preserving formatting. There are a number of Desktop apps around that all try to extract data from PDFs with sometimes more, sometimes less reliable results. I would say this is not realistically possible at the moment and all you can do is to extract plain text using XPDF or other command line tools.
It may be different with that new XML-Based PDF format but I don't really know anything about that yet.
Feel free to prove me wrong, of course - I'd be very interested myself if there were a solution.
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Convert HTML + CSS to PDF with PHP?
I have a form with 5 fields, two of which are textboxes extended with tinyMCE, the rest are simple inputs of type text.
I need to generate a PDF from this input. I understand that I can use Zend_Pdf to generate the PDF and include the plain text data. But how, for example, can I include a bulleted list from the tinyMCE fields?
Would the best way be to create an HTML file, and then use for example DOMPDF or HTML2PDF? Ideally, I'd prefer to just use the zend framework to create the document, position and insert the fields, and save.
Thanks in advance.
More info in Convert HTML + CSS to PDF with PHP?.
In my experience, Prince XML was the Rolls Royce of such technologies so far away and above any of the other ones it's not even funny. It's expensive though. But I had all sorts of problems with all the others.
Some time ago I tried to use HTML to PDF conversion programs to convert... HTML to PDF, but in the end I gave up with that approach and just created the PDFs directly in code. I use fpdf (http://www.fpdf.org/) as a base and added supporting code for lists and grids etc.
I am using Prince XML mentioned by cletus. Results are very good, even with css styled html with floats etc. It's expensive, but it just works and saves a lots of time.
FPDF is very old library for PHP4. It propably won't even work nowadays. I'd recommend DOMPDF or TCPDF. They both are for PHP5+ and can eat HTML or CSS to some degree.
You could convert it all to HTML and then use openoffice or some other tool (pandoc is quite nifty too) to convert from HTML to PDF.
Alternatively, you could take a look at LiveDocx, which has php-bindings too. It's a hosted service, but you can use it without charge.
I personal recommend command line application instead of any php libraries.
Reasons :
PHP libraries need more time and memory (cache) for conversion process
They need well formatted html pages only, otherwise through errors or warning
Not support for external style sheet.
Command Line Tool:
If run your script on Linux server then I suggest command line tool.
Reasons :
They are extremely fast as compared to PHP libraries.
Support css.
Accept non well formatted html.
Which command line tool to use?
wkhtmltopdf
htmltopdf
html2pdf
for more information refer Converting HTML to PDF (not PDF to HTML) using PHP
I have a PDF document with some external links.
I'd like to parse the document, replace the destination of the links then close (and serve) the PDF document, all using PHP
I know I can do this with PDFLib but I don't want to incur this cost.
I could re-write the document with FPDF or DomPDF, but some of these PDFs are quite complex so this would be a major time investment.
Surely there must be a way to do this directly to PDF docs, using native PHP?
TIA
I don't think there is a text/hyperlink changer class for PHP. The closest products, like pdftk, only does higher-level stuff like merging, splitting and applying watermarks.
Changing a pdf is much more difficult than generating it, so you need to use a pdf editor like Nitro PDF (untested), or why not Acrobat/Illustrator/InDesign.
If you must use PHP, regenerating the PDF:s with one of the free classes seems to be your best choice. I like FPDF very much, it gets my recommendation. If you decide to use it, check out FPDI as well, it can use existing PDF files as a template, maybe it will help you. Good luck!