What do you think about “TCPDF like” PHP solutions to generate a PDF?

Question

Don't you think the TCPDF solution force you to reivent the wheel, in term of layout rendering?

I think TCPDF doesn't allow a good separation of concerns, and is just too limited when you try to render dynamic tables, or wide portions of text.

I'm pretty interested in alternative solutions like wkhtml2pdf or XSL-FOP, but I would like some experience feedback.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I used FOP and Jasper Reports over the last years. Both are Java-Solutions but can be easily used within a PHP application. For that I use a PHP/Java-Bridge (at the moment the one from the ZendServer CE, but there is also a Open-Source-Bridge at Sourceforge)

For me JasperReports works better. There is a graphical WYSIWYG-Editor (iReport) for creating the Templates. FOP is great too but writing the XSL by hand is difficult and lengtly.

Answer 2

I haven't tried the two pdf generators that you mentioned, i'll give them a shoot... I used TCPDF and it worked good for me... It allows easily to turn html code to a pdf file... The drawbacks is that the translation is not always perfect, specially when you use css styles. Another drawback could be the heavy weight of the library...