Do you know of any free libraries to read PDFs in PHP, the built in PDF functionality is only for rendering PDF output.
Once again, Zend Framework strikes : Zend_Pdf is a PDF (Portable Document Format) manipulation engine. It can load, create, modify and save documents. Thus it can help any PHP driven application to dynamically create PDF documents by modifying existing templates or generating new ones from scratch. [...]
Once again, Zend Framework strikes :
Zend_Pdf is a PDF (Portable Document
Format) manipulation engine
Don't forget that Zend Pdf is appliacable to use in NON-Zend environment. Most of Zend componemts are easy pluggable to any PHP application.
If your webserver is Unix, use the pdftotext utlity to dump the PDF to text, then display it how you want it. It's not going to have the formatting, but the text will be available.
You can use FPDI to read pdf and translate them in fpdf
You can use phpLiveDocx to convert PDF, DOC, DOCX, RTF etc to TXT. For details see http://www.phplivedocx.org
Related
I have to generate few reports in PDF format with some inventory stats (no graphs, only tables). Additionally, I have to generate some pdf labels for the placed orders and units in a nice tabular format (taking care of landscape orientation and line wrapping) for the web platform. Which PHP API/Library would be best suitable for this purpose. I am using Zend framework but Zend's PDF API is not rich enough to serve the cause.
One option I am considering is to use LateX for generating PDFs.
Advices? Suggestions?
There are several PDF generation libraries and executables.
I've used:
TCPDF
DOMPDF
html2pdf as #redreggae suggested
wkhtmltopdf
Many other alive & dead solutions
They all rendered HTML to PDF. The problem of all (except wkhtmltopdf) was that they all used different (non-standard) rendering engines and results were often different between them and unsatisfying. wkhtmltopdf uses WebKit to interpret the HTML and create a pdf file. I personally prefer wkhtmltopdf after trying/using (in production) all other of the ones listed.. There is one drawback to it - it is an executable and as such it must be called with exec() however this should not be a big issue when proper coding is applied such that you prevent code injection.
If you want something higher level than HTML to PDF converters, you can try PHPJasperXML, it's a renderer for JasperReports on pure PHP.
How do I generate PDF files with PHP. php.net says that pdflib needs to be installed to use functions such as new_pdf ().
However, pdflib is not free and the lite version is not allowed for commercial use. I am confused. I would have thought PHP would have some built-in functionality to create PDF files.
How do I get through this as I do not want to use libraries such as fpdf, etc.?
You should try the following. They are some useful PHP libraries for PDF documents:
TCPDF
mPDF
DOM PDF
See Stack Overflow questions Generate PDF from HTML PHP and How to generate PDF files with PHP?.
It's your choice with which you feel more comfortable.
PHP does not have any in-built functions, so you have to use libraries. TCPDF is the easiest modules and it's free.
If you don't want to use pdflib, you will have to use another third-party library.
Zend provides one as part of the Zend Framework. But the ones we have used for various purposes are:
DomPDF is great for taking HTML and producing PDF files
tcPDF is a more class-based drawing style approach, but it works great and gives loads of control.
Which library is best to write PDF from HTML using Code Igniter?
Right now I'm using TCPDF, and it's taking much time to load a library.
Following are some useful PDF libraries & Tutorials for Codeignitor
PDF generation using dompdf
TCPDF-CodeIgniter Integration
Generating PDF files using CodeIgniter
mPDF with CodeIgniter
generating PDF files
Check out this article. The PDF library used there is quite fast and easy to use.
Since you're looking to convert HTML to a PDF, I highly recommend the wkhtmltopdf. It uses Qt and WebKit to generate PDF files of rendered markup, and even handles moderately complex JavaScript and AJAX. This makes it really useful for generating PDFs of pages that you have already created views and templates for, with the added benefit of being able to tweak and debug these pages with your browser. It works great for generating platform agnostic print views in your web app by normalizing the many nuances of various combinations of operating systems, web browsers, and printer drivers.
It's a stand-alone binary, so you may have trouble implementing it on shared hosting, but I used it recently on a project and could not have been more happy with it.
wkhtmltopdf: http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/
My personal favorite PHP Library and API for it:
https://github.com/mikehaertl/phpwkhtmltopdf
Check out R&OS library R&OS pdf
i find it easy to implement
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.
I have a module which merges a document from database records and .docx or .odt document model.
I have to output .docx, .odt or .pdf. For outputting to Microsoft and Open formats, there is no problem, all works properly.
But what I want to know is, can I output to a format (like XML or HTML) which I can use to subsequently build a PDF document?
If I can't, are there any libraries which provide a merge document capability like:
DOCX (or ODT) + database record => PDF
And I don't want to use phplivedocx.
I successfully put a portable version of libreoffice on my host's webserver, which I call with PHP to do a commandline conversion from .docx, etc. to pdf. on the fly. I do not have admin rights on my host's webserver. Here is my blog post of what I did:
http://geekswithblogs.net/robertphyatt/archive/2011/11/19/converting-.docx-to-pdf-or-.doc-to-pdf-or-.doc.aspx
Yay! Convert directly from .docx or .odt to .pdf using PHP with LibreOffice (OpenOffice's successor)!
I don't know any PHP library that does DOCX => PDF. In fact, the DOCX conversion to something else in PHP is an opened problem today. This is independent from how you made the DOCX.
But as you said, they are PHP libraries for HTML => PDF.
Html2Pdf is a well reputed PHP library that does HTML => PDF.
There is also DomPdf.
So if you can found a PHP library for DOCX => HTML, then it would work.
Of course it has some limitations because even if both PDF and DOCX are opened format, they have very specific features, they need huge rendering process, and the editors keep some good tips for them.
Converting DOCX to HTML is theoretically possible. There is a Windows software that does it by EpingSoft. If you need to do it in PHP, some web articles tell you how to make it, but since I cannot found any PHP code doing this, I guess it is more theoretical than practical.
http://www.quepublishing.com/articles/article.aspx?p=691502
How complicated that process would be
depends on how much of Word's native
formatting you need to preserve during
the conversion.
If you want to try this way, it's good to know that OpenTBS enables you to read the XML before and after the merge. It is based on a PHP class names TbsZip that can read any XML file in the DOCX since it's in fact a zip archive.
There is also posible to use PDF files directly in TBS after decompressing:
qpdf --qdf --object-streams=disable in.pdf out.pdf