Best pdf generator in PHP , mpdf or fpdf?

Question

hi all, Which is th best pdf generator for php, i know some opensources libs mpdf and fpdf.. Thanx in advance

Answer 1

I personally generate XSL:FO from PHP and use Apache FOP to convert it to PDF. Not a PHP-native solution, not very efficient either, but it works well even if you need to generate PDF with very complex layouts.

Answer 2

personally i'd rather go with tcpdf which is an ehnanced and mantained version of fpdf.

Answer 3

Personally I prefer to use [http://www.digitaljunkies.ca/dompdf/ dompdf] for simple PDF pages as it is very quick. you simply feed it an HTML source and it will generate the required page.

however for more complex designs i prefer the more classic [http://www.pdflib.com/ pdflib] which is available as a pecl for PHP. it has greater control over designs and allows you do do more complex designs like pixel-perfect forms.

Answer 4

http://www.fpdf.org/

Answer 5

The Zend Framework's Zend_Pdf is really good too. It's on par with pdflib in terms of control of output and complexity and is more portable because its a pure php solution. That said, its slower and uses more memory than pdflib. Pecl modules are always more efficient than a php solution.

DOMPdf is the easiest way to make a pdf quickly. Like Mike said, feed it html and it outputs a pdf. Under the hood, it has the option to use either r&ospdf or pdflib as the rendering engine.

Answer 6

I'm using ezpdf. It's a pdf class, fast and very easy to use. Also it has a good manual with examples.

Answer 7

http://sourceforge.net/projects/html2ps/, is the best if you need the css and 3c compatibily.

if you can install software on your server, i suggest you to use http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/.

There is also a drupal module using wkhtmltopdf :)

PHP take many resources to convert html in pdf, imho, php is not the right language to do that (if you expect a large numbers of coversion or large files to convert)

Answer 8

We had to solve this problem for a client website a while back, and it was surprisingly non-trivial, so we've built the solution into a SAAS product. You just pass our service the URL of the page you want to produce as a PDF, and it returns it.

It can cope with complex layouts, interprets CSS, and allows javascript to execute before render. There are also a number of options such as security, margins and footers that can be customised.

http://fourpdf.com/

Jake.