PHP PDF template library with PDF output? [closed]

Answer 1

It's a litte bit late but have a look at the PDFTemplate Library it does exatly what you want. You can create Open Document files (odt) and add placeholders in it. The PDFTemplate library can fill out these placeholders (even with images) and create a PDF file.

ODT Files with placeholders to PDF

Answer 2

Altough not exactly thing you asked, you may consider to make it at two steps: using some php templating sytem (smarty, dwoo) to generate html page and then using tools like Html2Pdf convert it to pdf. I am using it, and results are good (no problems with page layout etc)

Of course it depends of your input documents (can you use html instead of PDF/ ODT as source ) and complexity of the layout of those.

Answer 3

Late, but you can use OpenSource template designer https://github.com/applicius/dhek/releases , to define pkaceholders/areas over any existing PDF, then load it in PHP (as it's JSON format) and write accordingly on original PDF using fpdf lib, to generate custom PDF with dynamic data written on.

Answer 4

I'll add this new answer since the FDF PHP extension is now dead.

I've just followed these instructions and ended up executing one perl script then the pdftk command

I'm pretty aware it's far from being a real PHP solution but it's reliable and fairly easy to implement on any *nix platform.

The tools described there are also available on Debian, just in case you were wondering.

Answer 5

Pekka,

I looked in to this previously, I think you can use pdftk (a command line utility), to fill in a PDF form using FDF/XFDF data files, which you could easily generate from within PHP. That was the best option I've seen so far, though there may well be a native library.

pdftk is quite useful in general, worth having a look at.

Update: Have a look here: http://php.net/manual/en/book.fdf.php

Answer 6

This is not very practical, but for completeness: If you already have an ODT template, then you might very well retain that as template. Modifying the OpenDocument content.xml and replacing placeholders therein is pretty simple. If so, you could use unoconv or pyodconverter to transform the ODT into a final PDF.

unoconv -f pdf -o final.pdf template.odt

Very obviously this requires a full OpenOffice setup (UNO and Writer) on the webserver. And obviously not every webhoster would go with that! haha. Even if it's simple on any Debian or Fedora setup. The execution speed would probably not be stellar either. But then it might be the cleanest approach, since OOo governs both formats way better than any PHP class ever could.