When it comes to working with different file formats, PHP is like a Swiss Army knife: it has a tool to handle almost anything you can throw at it. JPEG images, XML files, Word documents, ZIP archives…you name it, and there’s a PHP extension to handle it!

This incredible versatility also applies to the topic of today’s article: the PDF, or Portable Document Format. Not content with just one, PHP actually comes with two different extensions that allow developers to dynamically generate PDF documents: the PDFlib extension, and the libHaru extension. Over the next few pages, I’m going to take a quick look at the Haru extension, providing you with a brief overview of its functions and demonstrating how you can use it in your PHP development. So come on it, and let’s get going!

For end-users, the ability to output a PDF from your application is expected as a standard feature. But as a developer, implementing PDF output can be a major expense and headache, especially when developing for the web. You could just instruct the user to print the necessary pages from a browser to a PDF virtual printer, but that requires extra software on the client, and the browser will add information to the printed page. Traditional programmatic PDF creation can be painstaking, often requiring the developer to do very complex calculations just to place text on the page. PDF generation on the web usually requires root access and complicated installations on the server. But all that is about to change. Leveraging the power of PHP and a PDF generation library called dompdf, you can create a simple, seamless user experience in Adobe Flex.

p. How many times have you been surfing a web site and smacked your forehead because you’d really rather have the page in a PDF than in HTML. Well relief is on the way with this handy new PHP 5 class! Convert HTML to PDF with dompdf.

p. Heidily Ho campers! It’s that time again. Yep, the old inbox is full so I know it’s time to do a framework mailing list roundup. So roll yer jeans up to yer knees and wade on in, you’ll get used to the smell after a while.

We have seen in Part 1 how PDF files are, after all, just plain text files, with specific markup syntax that describes what should happen
to objects within the document, such as text and images. We shall now further examine this syntax, to allow us to create a more complete PDF document (i.e more than simple text).

PDF files are, after all, just plain text files with specific markup syntax that describes what should happen to objects within the document, such as text and images. It follows that, armed with some PDF logic, anyone can create a PDF file. In this tutorial you will be shown the basic features of the PDF language, to enable you to put together your own PDF document.