PHP PDF template library with PDF output? [closed]

Answer 1

fpdf and there is another extention on top of it, which I can't remember, which allows you to import templates

Answer 2

Your best bet would be to generate the entire document on the fly, with the template defined programatically using fpdf or something similar. That way, your text will not be cut off by paragraphs or anything like that, and you can easily position images/other elements as required.

Answer 3

Ok I'm trying to help you solve the problem a little.

First the answer for couple of your question.

Q - Am I overlooking something?

A - No. There is a PHP PDF library that can replace placeholder variables in an existing PDF and generate a PDF file as the end result, without screwing up the layout

Q - Is there a way to do this using PDF forms?

A - Yes. absolutelly the tric to doing this is by using a PDF Forms

For both answer you can use Justin Koivisto fill pdf form field php library. For more detail you please go to http://koivi.com/fill-pdf-form-fields/tutorial.php. Take a look there for additional information.

Credit to Justin Koivisto for his work

P.S

For workaround for displaying a table like output from pdf form please consider to take some reading on Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher User's Guide - Creating a PDF Template

Answer 4

Have you considered using something like XSL:Formatting Objects (XSL:FO)? Basically they're XML documents that are processed and turned into PDFs. Doing string - or better, DOM - replacements within that should be pretty simple. It supports embedding images, links, annotations, etc.

It's not PHP but there are a number of PHP wrappers for it along with ways of using it via exec, etc. Not an ideal but it takes care of the template portion completely. For some more info: http://techportal.inviqa.com/2009/12/16/transforming-xml-with-php-and-xsl/

There's an implementation available as an Apache project - http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/