Convert HTML + CSS to PDF with PHP?

Have a look at WKHTMLTOPDF . It is open source, based on webkit and free.

We wrote a small tutorial here.

After some investigation and general hair-pulling the solution seems to be HTML2PDF. DOMPDF did a terrible job with tables, borders and even moderately complex layout and htmldoc seems reasonably robust but is almost completely CSS-ignorant and I don't want to go back to doing HTML layout without CSS just for that program.

HTML2PDF looked the most promising but I kept having this weird error about null reference arguments to node_type. I finally found the solution to this. Basically, PHP 5.1.x worked fine with regex replaces (preg_replace_*) on strings of any size. PHP 5.2.1 introduced a php.ini config directive called pcre.backtrack_limit. What this config parameter does is limits the string length for which matching is done. Why this was introduced I don't know. The default value was chosen as 100,000. Why such a low value? Again, no idea.

A bug was raised against PHP 5.2.1 for this, which is still open almost two years later.

What's horrifying about this is that when the limit is exceeded, the replace just silently fails. At least if an error had been raised and logged you'd have some indication of what happened, why and what to change to fix it. But no.

So I have a 70k HTML file to turn into PDF. It requires the following php.ini settings:

• pcre.backtrack_limit = 2000000; # probably more than I need but that's OK
• memory_limit = 1024M; # yes, one gigabyte; and
• max_execution_time = 600; # yes, 10 minutes.

Now the astute reader may have noticed that my HTML file is smaller than 100k. The only reason I can guess as to why I hit this problem is that html2pdf does a conversion into xhtml as part of the process. Perhaps that took me over (although nearly 50% bloat seems odd). Whatever the case, the above worked.

Now, html2pdf is a resource hog. My 70k file takes approximately 5 minutes and at least 500-600M of RAM to create a 35 page PDF file. Not quick enough (by far) for a real-time download unfortunately and the memory usage puts the memory usage ratio in the order of 1000-to-1 (600M of RAM for a 70k file), which is utterly ridiculous.

Unfortunately, that's the best I've come up with.

Why dont you try MPDF version 2.0?.. I used for creating PDF document.Its working fine...

Checkout TCPDF. It has some HTML to PDF functionality that might be enough for what you need. It's also free!

I suggest http://docraptor.com (which uses PrinceXML as the "engine")

If your meaning is to create a pdf from php, pdflib will help you.

Else, if you want to convert an HTML page in pdf via PHP, you'll find a little trouble outta here

So, the options I know are:

DOMPDF : php class that wrap the html and build the pdf. Works good, customizable (if you know php), based on pdflib, if i remember right it takes even some CSS. Bad news: slow when the html is big or many complex.

HTML2PS: same of DOMPDF, but this one convert first in .ps (ghostscript), then, in whatever format you need (pdf, jpg, png). For me is little better then dompdf, but have the same speed problem.. oh, better compatibility with css.

Those two are php classes, but if you can install some software on the server, and access it throught passthru() or system(), give a look to these too:

wkhtmltopdf: based on webkit (safari's wrapper), is really fast and powerfull.. seem like is the best one (atm) for convert on the fly html pages to pdf, taking only 2 seconds for a 3 pages xHTML document with CSS2. Is a recent project, anyway, the google.code page is often updated.

htmldoc : this one is a tank, it really never stop/crash.. the project seem death in the 2007, but anyway if you dont need css compatibility this can be nice for you.

tcpdf - this is an ehnanced and mantained version of fpdf. Main Features of tpdf and it is also having less execution time with great output. For detailed tutorial on using the two most popular pdf generation classes: TCPDF and FPDF.. please follow this link

See this posts also.

1. Converting HTML in PHP File to PDF File
2. Best pdf generator in PHP , mpdf or fpdf?
3. Export a html into PDF in PHP?
4. Writing HTML with PHP variables to PDF file?
5. How to convert html into pdf with php?
6. Tool for exporting html as pdf

Just to bump the thread, I've tried DOMPDF and it worked perfectly. I've used divs and other block level elements to position everythign. Kept it strictly CSS2.1 and it played nicely.

There's a tutorial on Zend's devzone on generating pdf from php (part 1, part 2) without any external libraries. I never implemented this sort of solution, but since it's all php, you might find it more flexible to implement and debug.

I am using fpdf to produce pdf files using php. It's working well for me so far to produce simple outputs.

Thanks to the person who posted the "WKHTMLTOPDF" suggestion.

I was previously using "mPDF" which does a decent job of rendering HTML and CSS, however due to a recent issue with "nested tables", I am going to try "WKHTMLTOPDF".

So far, I've tested it with a few websites, and found it to "lightning fast", and "pretty damn accurate" in terms of rendering as intended.

Given it's based on WebKits, I'm sure it'll do most websites without issue.

* One thing to note: in using it in a "web-app" you'll need to build a wrapper. For any programmer, this should be a breeze. *

-Peter

Well if you want to find a perfect XHTML+CSS to PDF converter library, forget it. It's far from possible. Because it's just like finding a perfect browser (XHTML+CSS rendering engine). Do we have one? IE or FF?

I have had some success with DOMPDF. The thing is that you have to modify your HTML+CSS code to go with the way the library is meant to work. Other than that, I have pretty good results.

See below:

Original HTML

Converting HTML to PDF

Perhaps you might try and use Tidy before handing the file to the converter. If one of the renderer chokes on some HTML problem (like unclosed tag), it might help it.

I dont think a php class will be the best for render an xHtml page with css.

What happen when a new css rule come out? (soon css 3.0...)

The best way to render an html page is, obvisiuly, a browser. Firefox 3.0 can natively 'print' in pdf format, torisugary developed an extension (command line print) to use it. Here you'll find it.

Anyway, there are still many problmes runninr firefox just as a pdf converter...

At the moment, i think that wkhtmltopdf is the best (that is the one used by the safari browser), fast, quick, awesome. Yes, opensource as well... Give it a look

Try grabbing the latest nightly dompdf build - I was using an older version that was a terrible resource hog and took forever to render my pdf. After grabbing a nightly from here:

http://eclecticgeek.com/dompdf/

It only took a few seconds to generate the PDF - AND it was just as nicely rendered as with PrinceXML / Docraptor. Seems like they've seriously optimized the dompdf code since I last used it!

Good news! Snappy!!

Snappy is a very easy open source PHP5 library, allowing thumbnail, snapshot or PDF generation from a url or a html page. And... it uses the excellent webkit-based wkhtmltopdf

Enjoy! ^_^

It's already been mentioned, but I'd just like to confirm that mpdf is the easiest, most powerful and most free html to pdf converter out there. The sky's really the limit. You can even generate pdfs of dynamic, user generated data.

For instance, a client wanted a CMS system so he could update the track list of the music he played at his club. That was no problem, but he also wanted users to be able download a .pdf of the playlist, and so this downloadable pdf had to be updated by the cms too. Thanks to mpdf, with some simple loops and interspersed variables I could do just that. Something that I thought would take me weeks literally took me minutes.

Download page http://www.mpdf1.com/mpdf/index.php

Great article that helped me get started http://www.smaizys.com/php/mpdf-html-to-pdf-introduction/

Fine rendering doesn't mean anything. Does it validate?

All browsers do the most they can to just show something on the screen, no matter how bad the input. And of course they do not do the same thing. If you want the same rendering as FireFox, you could use its rendering engine. There are pdf generators for it. It is an awful lot of work, though.

This question is pretty old already, but haven't seen anyone mentioning CutyCapt so I will :)

CutyCapt

CutyCapt is a small cross-platform command-line utility to capture WebKit's rendering of a web page into a variety of vector and bitmap formats, including SVG, PDF, PS, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, GIF, and BMP

Use DOMPDF for best result. Here are Examples Link:

http://pxd.me/dompdf/www/examples.php

Darryl Hein's mention above of TCPDF (http://www.tecnick.com/public/code/cp_dpage.php?aiocp_dp=tcpdf) is likely a great idea. Nicola Asuni's code is pretty handy and powerful. The only killer is if you ever plan on merging PDF files with your generated PDF it doesn't have those features. You would have to create the PDF and then merge it using something like PDFTK by Sid Steward (www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/).

http://code.google.com/p/flying-saucer/ not PHP, but a java library, which does the thing:

Flying Saucer takes XML or XHTML and applies CSS 2.1-compliant stylesheets to it, in order to render to PDF

It is usable from PHP via system() or a similar call. Although it requires XML well-formedness of the input.

pdfcrowd does the job with a simple API. Free for personal use and not that expensive for professional use.

if you are looking to convert less than 100 html pages into pdf within a month, than pdfcrowd can do the job for you. Really simple and easy to integrate.

I recommend TCPDF or DOMPDF, is that order

I've tried a lot of different libraries for PHP. All the listed I've tried. In my opinion TCPDF library is the best compromise performance/usability. It's very simply to install and use, also good performance in small medium application. If you need high performance and very big PDF document, use Zend_PDF module, but get ready to coding hard!