Generate PDF on the fly

[weblord]

http://www.fpdf.org/
What is FPDF?

FPDF is a PHP class which allows to generate PDF files with pure PHP, that is to say without using the PDFlib library. F from FPDF stands for Free: you may use it for any kind of usage and modify it to suit your needs.

FPDF has other advantages: high level functions. Here is a list of its main features:

* Choice of measure unit, page format and margins
* Page header and footer management
* Automatic page break
* Automatic line break and text justification
* Image support (JPEG, PNG and GIF)
* Colors
* Links
* TrueType, Type1 and encoding support
* Page compression

FPDF requires no extension (except zlib to activate compression and GD for GIF support) and works with PHP4 and PHP5.

The tutorials will give you a quick start. The complete online documentation is here and download area is there. It is strongly advised to read the FAQ which lists the most common questions and issues.

A script section is available and provides some useful extensions (such as bookmarks, rotations, tables, barcodes...).
What languages can I use?

The class can produce documents in many languages other than the Western European ones: Central European, Cyrillic, Greek, Baltic and Thai, provided you own TrueType or Type1 fonts with the desired character set. Chinese, Japanese and Korean are supported too.
What about performance?

Of course, the generation speed of the document is less than with PDFlib. However, the performance penalty keeps very reasonable and suits in most cases, unless your documents are particularly complex or heavy.

pdf are also searchable via google.com

 

[Kate]

It is a good tool but it does not handle Unicode text.

 

[godinu]

not to threadjack (Hopefully this won't be) but Open Office will convert your doc to pdf instantly too. works great with just one button click.

 

[weblord]

that one is ok tool as well for generating .pdf for free but the one on this thread is using .php meaning online generator of .pdf

not to threadjack (Hopefully this won't be) but Open Office will convert your doc to pdf instantly too. works great with just one button click.

 

[leo.bonnafe]

A much easier way to generate PDF files using just PHP is phpLiveDocx.

The idea is as follows: Using a word processor, you first make a template file. In this template file, you place any number of merge fields. In PHP, you the assign values to the merge fields and save the resulting document in any supported format: DOC, DOCX, PDF pr RTF.

It is dead easy to use and can be downloaded from phpLiveDocx.org:

http://www.phplivedocx.org/articles/brief-introduction-to-phplivedocx/

Have fun!

Leo

 

[klarth]

Thanks for these guys, I've been looking for something like this.

 

[bbrez1]

Sorry for bumping this but: The best of the best all time is http://www.digitaljunkies.ca/dompdf/, it's a HTML to PDF converter which means you design how the PDF looks using HTML and there you have it... a nice PDF file

 

[Harrish Jimmy]

I would say that this day I am so lucky. I ve been digging the net for free programming resources that I can use for programming self study. So, far I stumble to a lot of free stuff and tutorials to help me, including this site. This site will be a very nice addition to my programming stuff archieved. Thanks.