I’ve got a separate website that used to offer a service where you could get a custom report in the form of a PDF sent to you. For that I used a free open source PHP script/library called FPDF. It’s reasonably well documented, but there are a lot of nuances that not really intuitive. Used in combination with a script called FDPI for importing an existing PDF’s, mixing in a little data from users, databases, and the internet, and it was a pretty amazing thing.
An acquaintance of mine suggested I take a look at a similar library for creating PDF’s with PHP called TCPDF. The documentation borders on the compulsive – which I sincerely appreciate. While the immediate downside is that it does not have a built-in PDF importer, it is apparently compatible with the aforementioned1 FDPI. The part that I really like about TCPDF from scanning through these examples is the robust HTML rendering engine. It would be a really amazing to be able to dump a chunk of HTML directly into a PDF without having to design a script to read through it all, parse it, and then format it specifically for the PDF.
- Who the hell uses THIS freaking word?! [↩]