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 in 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 drawbacks. You'll avoid wasting weeks comparing and hacking a multitude of solutions. This is your guide to achieve 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 PDF/A, tagged PDF, and so on.
However, if you buy this book now, you'll get free lifetime updates! And I might raise the price in the future, so hurry up!
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
-
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
The Leanpub 60-day 100% Happiness Guarantee
Within 60 days of purchase you can get a 100% refund on any Leanpub purchase, in two clicks.
See full terms
Do Well. Do Good.
Authors have earned$11,820,291writing, publishing and selling on Leanpub, earning 80% royalties while saving up to 25 million pounds of CO2 and up to 46,000 trees.
Learn more about writing on Leanpub
Free Updates. DRM Free.
If you buy a Leanpub book, you get free updates for as long as the author updates the book! Many authors use Leanpub to publish their books in-progress, while they are writing them. All readers get free updates, regardless of when they bought the book or how much they paid (including free).
Most Leanpub books are available in PDF (for computers) and EPUB (for phones, tablets and Kindle). The formats that a book includes are shown at the top right corner of this page.
Finally, Leanpub books don't have any DRM copy-protection nonsense, so you can easily read them on any supported device.
Learn more about Leanpub's ebook formats and where to read them
Top Books
Stratospheric
Tom Hombergs, Björn Wilmsmann, and Philip RiecksFrom Zero to Production with Spring Boot and AWS. All you need to know to get a Spring Boot application into production with AWS. No previous AWS knowledge required.
Go to stratospheric.dev for a tour of the contents.
OpenIntro Statistics
David Diez, Christopher Barr, Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel, and OpenIntroA complete foundation for Statistics, also serving as a foundation for Data Science.
Leanpub revenue supports OpenIntro (US-based nonprofit) so we can provide free desk copies to teachers interested in using OpenIntro Statistics in the classroom and expand the project to support free textbooks in other subjects.
More resources: openintro.org.
node-opcua by example
Etienne RossignonGet the best out of node-opcua through a set of documented examples by the author himself that will allow you to create stunning OPCUA Servers or Clients.
Advanced Web Application Architecture
Matthias NobackThe missing manual for making your web applications future-proof
C++20 - The Complete Guide
Nicolai M. JosuttisAll new language and library features of C++20 (for those who know previous C++ versions).
The book presents all new language and library features of C++20. Learn how this impacts day-to-day programming, to benefit in practice, to combine new features, and to avoid all new traps.
Buy early, pay less, free updates.
Other books:
Ansible for DevOps
Jeff GeerlingAnsible is a simple, but powerful, server and configuration management tool. Learn to use Ansible effectively, whether you manage one server—or thousands.
R Programming for Data Science
Roger D. PengThis book brings the fundamentals of R programming to you, using the same material developed as part of the industry-leading Johns Hopkins Data Science Specialization. The skills taught in this book will lay the foundation for you to begin your journey learning data science. Printed copies of this book are available through Lulu.
Thinking with Types
Sandy MaguireThis book aims to be the comprehensive manual for type-level programming. It's about getting you from here to there---from a competent Haskell programmer to one who convinces the compiler to do their work for them.
Maîtriser Apache JMeter
Philippe Mouawad, Bruno Demion (Milamber), and Antonio Gomes RodriguesToute la puissance d'Apache JMeter expliquée par ses commiteurs et utilisateurs experts. De l'intégration continue en passant par le Cloud, vous découvrirez comment intégrer JMeter à vos processus "Agile" et Devops.
If you're looking for the newer english version of this book, go to Master JMeter : From load testing to DevOps
D3 Start to Finish
Peter CookD3 Start to Finish shows you how to build a custom, interactive and beautiful data visualisation using the JavaScript library D3.js (versions 6 & 7).
The book covers D3.js concepts such as selections, joins, requests, scale functions, events & transitions. You'll put these concepts into practice by building a custom, interactive data visualisation.
Top Bundles
- #1
CCIE Service Provider Ultimate Study Bundle
2 Books
Piotr Jablonski, Lukasz Bromirski, and Nick Russo have joined forces to deliver the only CCIE Service Provider training resource you'll ever need. This bundle contains a detailed and challenging collection of workbook labs, plus an extensively detailed technical reference guide. All of us have earned the CCIE Service Provider certification... - #3
Pattern-Oriented Memory Forensics and Malware Detection
2 Books
This training bundle for security engineers and researchers, malware and memory forensics analysts includes two accelerated training courses for Windows memory dump analysis using WinDbg. It is also useful for technical support and escalation engineers who analyze memory dumps from complex software environments and need to check for possible... - #4
All the Books of The Medical Futurist
6 Books
We put together the most popular books from The Medical Futurist to provide a clear picture about the major trends shaping the future of medicine and healthcare. Digital health technologies, artificial intelligence, the future of 20 medical specialties, big pharma, data privacy, digital health investments and how technology giants such as Amazon... - #5
Software Architecture
2 Books
"Software Architecture for Developers" is a practical and pragmatic guide to modern, lightweight software architecture, specifically aimed at developers. You'll learn:The essence of software architecture.Why the software architecture role should include coding, coaching and collaboration.The things that you really need to think about before... - #6
Practical FP in Scala + Functional event-driven architecture
2 Books
Practical FP in Scala (A hands-on approach) & Functional event-driven architecture, aka FEDA, (Powered by Scala 3), together as a bundle! The content of PFP in Scala is a requirement to understand FEDA so why not take advantage of this bundle!?