PDFlib for php, is there an alternative [closed]

Answer 1

Another option is Zend_Pdf which is part of Zend Framework

Answer 2

TCPDF is one I've come across. Seems to be in active development (it shows up in Freshmeat.org very regularly)

FPDF also comes up in Google.

Both are free and open source.

Answer 3

The FPDF is free and popular alternative to go for :)

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.

Answer 4

TCPDF is an open source library for generating PDFs. Also on wikipedia.

Answer 5

There are tons out there.

As some have mentioned, there are:

1. TCPDF
2. FPDF
3. Zend_Pdf
4. DOMPDF - CSS 2.1 compliant
5. WKHtmlToPdf
6. HTML2PDF

And there's a ton more out there if you look...

If you include commercial, I've heard good things about Prince...

Personally, I've had great luck with DomPDF... TCPDF tended to be VERY buggy, but had a VERY active developer (which turned out to be a mixed blessing since the releases often broke the API), but then again this was years ago, so it could have changed. My experience with FPDF was that it was very buggy as well, with little to no support. But again, that was several years ago as well and it could have changed since then.

Answer 6

Phantomjs now supports pdf output: http://we-love-php.blogspot.fi/2012/12/create-pdf-invoices-with-html5-and-phantomjs.html

The problem with various libraries (PDFlib, FPDF etc.) is the rather long learning curve. PhantomJS uses html5+css3+svg+canvas, which have a long history and large user space and php people know html+css usually very well, so the learning curve with PhantomJS is short.

PhantomJS has nothing to do with PHP, but if you have rather new server, it is very easy to install and use. The downside is that Centos5 is not supported, but fortunately Centos6 is.

PhantomJS uses true browser engine (Webkit) for page rendering, so the result should be better than with various html2pdf libraries and support for new techniques (html5+css3+svg+canvas) is better. Support for svg opens new possibilities, that are before achieved only with the most advanced pdf generation libraries (eg. pdflib) and when PhantomJS starts to support eg. SVG filters fully, then the sky is limit.