Mastering PDF with PHP
Mastering PDF with PHP
Create, read and edit PDF files in your PHP applications
About the Book
Welcome to the world of dynamically built PDF documents!
In today's web applications, the Portable Document Format is commonly used to send invoices, reports, tickets, e-books, and many other files. Chances are that you are already working on a project that requires processing PDF files.
With this book, you'll save a lot of time by knowing the most popular tools on the market, their features, and their drawbacks. You'll avoid wasting weeks comparing and hacking a multitude of solutions. This is your guide to achieving great results faster!
My book is not tied to any particular framework, however we might use some components. Users of all frameworks are welcome here, just like people who code plain PHP.
This is a work in progress. I will add more details about every HTML to PDF conversion tool that I know. I will cover advanced features like annotations, certificates, tagging, and so on.
If you buy this book now, you'll get free lifetime updates!
About the Author
Table of Contents
-
Introduction
- Who is this book for?
- How to read this book?
- About the author
-
What is Portable Document Format for?
- Quick look at the history
- Main features
- Which version to use?
- Differences between HTML and PDF
- Is PDF a right choice for me?
-
The structure of a PDF file
- Main goals
- Four parts of a file
- Write your own PDF in Notepad
- Adding metadata
- Compression
- Summary
-
An example document: an invoice
- An example invoice
- Basic HTML structure
- Body structure
- Creating a stylesheet
- Validating document syntax
- Summary
-
Choosing a tool to generate PDF files
- Two ways to create a PDF file
- Native PHP libraries
- External conversion tools
- Summary
-
Presenting a document to a user
- Displaying a PDF in a frame
- Browser window
- Downloading a PDF
- More about filenames
- Sending a PDF over email
- Saving a file
- Display preferences
- Summary
-
Understanding fonts
- How fonts work?
- Font file formats in the PDF
- Picking a proper font
- Selecting a font in CSS
- Text transformations
- ANSI or Mac versus Unicode
- Summary
-
Encryption
- Choosing the cipher
- User permissions
- Encryption with TCPDF
- Encryption with mPDF
- Encryption with Dompdf
- Encryption with FPDF
- Encrypting an existing file with command line tools
- Summary
-
Calling external programs from a PHP script
- Input, output and exit codes
- Basic execution from a PHP script
- Escaping arguments
- Opening and controlling a process
- The most convenient solution: The Process Component
- Reporting progress of time-consuming tasks
- Queueing tasks
- Summary
-
Styling pages with CSS
- Page dimensions and margins
- Adjusting individual pages
- Page-margin boxes and generated content
- Bleed area and crop marks
- Controlling page breaks
- Media queries
- Summary
-
Reading and testing PDF files
- Metadata and text extraction
- Taking a screenshot
- Summary
-
Editing PDF files
- Importing a document to FPDF or TCPDF
- The PDF Toolkit
- Manipulating files with pdfjam
- Summary
- Notes
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