PHP PDF template library with PDF output? [closed]
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4416667
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Is there any PHP PDF library that can replace placeholder variables in an existing PDF, ODT or DOCX document, and generate a PDF file as the end result, without screwing up the layout?
Requirements:
Needs no 3rd party web service
Ability to run on shared web hosting would be ideal (no binary installations / packages required)
Mind you, a library that is able to load an existing PDF file and insert text programmatically at a specific position is not enough for my use case.
As far as my research shows, there is no library that can do this:
TCPDF can only generate documents from scratch
FPDI can read existing PDF templates, but can only add contents programmatically (no template variable replacement)
There are various DOCX/ODT template libraries out there but they don't output PDF
PHPDOCx claims to be able to do exactly what I need - but they don't offer a trial version and I'm not going to buy a cat in a bag, especially not when there seems to be no other product on the web that does this. I find it hard to believe they can do this without problems - if you have successfully done this using the product, please drop a line here.
Am I overlooking something?
Is there a way to do this using PDF forms? I am creating the source documents in OpenOffice 3.
I may be able to use standard Linux commands (pdftk is available for example, trying that out right now.)
Update: *Argh!* I was called out of the office and the bounty expired in the meantime. Starting a new bounty: As far as my testing shows, no solution works for me perfectly yet.
Update II: I will be looking the pdftk approach soon, but I am also starting another bounty for one more round of collecting additional input. This question has now seen 1300 rep points in bounties, must be some kind of a record :)
Solution
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
OTHER TIPS
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.
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/
fpdf and there is another extention on top of it, which I can't remember, which allows you to import templates
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
