Professional LAMP: Linux®, Apache, MySQL®, and PHP5 Web Development

10.1. PDFLib

Whether your content is academic or commercial in nature, no professionally developed website would be complete without the ability to deliver content as a PDF (Portable Document Format). While there are several Open Source libraries available to PHP developers, notably FPDF (http://www.fpdf.org/), and pdf-php (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdf-php), PHP's built-in PDFlib functions are arguably the most efficient means of doing so. The PDFlib functions, moved to the PHP Extension Community Library (PECL since PHP 4.3.9), are a wrapper for the commercial PDFLib (http://www.pdflib.com/) PDF processing library. The advantage offered by PDFLib over the purely PHP-based solutions is that of speed. Compiled C code, such as PDFLib, is magnitudes of order faster than PHP code interpreted by Apache. The disadvantage is the licensing cost for commercial use.

The observant reader will note that this text refers to two distinct capitalizations of the subject matter: "PDFLib" and "PDFlib." This is to differentiate the C library, named "PDFLib" by its owners, from the PHP wrapper library "PDFlib." It is also noteworthy that the C library documentation does not rigidly adhere to this convention.

10.1.1. Configuration

PHP's support for PDFLib has undergone significant changes recently, and like so many other features of the language and its myriad libraries, it is expected to undergo further changes, especially in light of the growing acceptance of PHP within the professional ...