Programming PHP, 4th Edition

Chapter 11. PDF

Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) is a popular way to get a consistent look, both on screen and in print, for documents. This chapter shows you how to dynamically create PDF files with text, graphics, links, and more. Doing so opens the door to many applications. You can create almost any kind of business document, including form letters, invoices, and receipts. In addition, you can automate most paperwork by overlaying text onto a scan of the paper form and saving the result as a PDF file.

PDF Extensions

PHP has several libraries for generating PDF documents. This chapter’s examples use the popular FPDF library, a set of PHP code you include in your scripts with the require() function—it doesn’t require any server-side configuration or support, so you can use it even without support from your host. The basic concepts, structure, and features of a PDF file should be common to all the PDF libraries, however.

Note

Another PDF-generating library, TCPDF, is better at handling HTML special characters and UTF-8 multilanguage output than FPDF. Look it up if you need that capability. The methods you’ll use are writeHTMLCell() and writeHTML().

Documents and Pages

A PDF document is made up of a number of pages, each of which contains text and/or images. This section shows you how to create a document, add pages in that document, write text to the pages, and send the pages back to the browser when you’re done.

Note

The examples in this chapter assume that you have ...