Convert HTML CSS to PDF

Question

I have an HTML  not XHTML  document that renders fine in Firefox 3 and IE 7   It uses fairly basic CSS to style it and renders fine in HTML   I m now after a way of converting it to PDF   I have tried    DOMPDF  it had huge problems with tables   I factored out my large nested tables and it helped  before it was just consuming up to 128M of memory then dying--thats my limit on memory in php ini  but it makes a complete mess of tables and doesn t seem to get images   The tables were just basic stuff with some border styles to add some lines at various points  HTML2PDF and HTML2PS  I actually had better luck with this   It rendered some of the images  all the images are Google Chart URLs  and the table formatting was much better but it seemed to have some complexity problem I haven t figured out yet and kept dying with unknown node type   errors   Not sure where to go from here  and Htmldoc  this seems to work fine on basic HTML but has almost no support for CSS whatsoever so you have to do everything in HTML  I didn t realize it was still 2001 in Htmldoc-land     so it s useless to me    I tried a Windows app called Html2Pdf Pilot that actually did a pretty decent job but I need something that at a minimum runs on Linux and ideally runs on-demand via PHP on the Webserver   What am I missing  or how can I resolve this issue

User · Answer

Perhaps you might try and use Tidy before handing the file to the converter  If one of the renderer chokes on some HTML problem  like unclosed tag   it might help it

User · Answer

Fine rendering doesn t mean anything  Does it validate    All browsers do the most they can to just show something on the screen  no matter how bad the input  And of course they do not do the same thing  If you want the same rendering as FireFox  you could use its rendering engine  There are pdf generators for it  It is an awful lot of work  though

User · Answer

Perhaps you might try and use Tidy before handing the file to the converter  If one of the renderer chokes on some HTML problem  like unclosed tag   it might help it

User · Answer

not PHP  but a Java library  which does the thing      Flying Saucer takes XML or XHTML and applies CSS 2 1-compliant   stylesheets to it  in order to render to PDF   It is usable from PHP via system   or a similar call  Although it requires XML well-formedness of the input

User · Answer

I dont think a php class will be the best for render an xHtml page with css   What happen when a new css rule come out   soon css 3 0      The best way to render an html page is  obvisiuly  a browser  Firefox 3 0 can natively  print  in pdf format  torisugary developed an extension  command line print  to use it  Here you ll find it   Anyway  there are still many problmes runninr firefox just as a pdf converter     At the moment  i think that wkhtmltopdf is the best  that is the one used by the safari browser   fast  quick  awesome  Yes  opensource as well     Give it a look

User · Answer

Have a look at wkhtmltopdf   It is open source  based on webkit and free   We wrote a small tutorial here   EDIT  2017     If it was to build something today  I wouldn t go that route anymore  But would use http   pdfkit org  instead  Probably stripping it of all its nodejs dependencies  to run in the browser

User · Answer

Good news  Snappy    Snappy is a very easy open source PHP5 library  allowing thumbnail  snapshot or PDF generation from a url or a html page  And    it uses the excellent webkit-based wkhtmltopdf  Enjoy

User · Answer

I developed a public API to build PDF files from web pages  It has a nice PHP client class that makes it super easy to use  It uses wkhtmltopdf to render the PDF in the cloud     No need for anything special in the HTML  No need for absolute URLS in images css js links  Works on localhost  dev machine  too   Currently the service has endpoints in 4 Azure regions  US East  US West  EU North  Southeast Asia   It s fast since it uses a proprietary protocol to send the web page contents to the API for conversion to PDF   It s reliable because all endpoints are load balanced   Free account available for testing or low usage  Details on the web site   https   rotativahq com

User · Answer

I dont think a php class will be the best for render an xHtml page with css   What happen when a new css rule come out   soon css 3 0      The best way to render an html page is  obvisiuly  a browser  Firefox 3 0 can natively  print  in pdf format  torisugary developed an extension  command line print  to use it  Here you ll find it   Anyway  there are still many problmes runninr firefox just as a pdf converter     At the moment  i think that wkhtmltopdf is the best  that is the one used by the safari browser   fast  quick  awesome  Yes  opensource as well     Give it a look

User · Answer

I am using fpdf to produce PDF files using PHP  It s working well for me so far to produce simple outputs

User · Answer

Although there are many solutions offered already  I recommend the following two    HTM2PDF - offers an API to convert HTML to PDF and also has a PHP SDK  which makes it very easy to implement in PHP  It offers a choice of server locations in Europe  Asia and the USA PDFmyURL - offers an API that does URL and HTML to PDF as well  with roughly the same functionality as HTM2PDF  but works on a load balanced landscape and has been around a little longer   The thing that s different about these two APIs from all the previously mentioned solutions  is that - besides converting HTML to PDF with CSS and JavaScript - it also offers PDF rights management  watermarking and encryption  Therefore it s an all-in-one solution for those who want to hit the ground running   Disclaimer  I work for Kaiomi  a company that operates both of these websites

User · Answer

Although there are many solutions offered already  I recommend the following two    HTM2PDF - offers an API to convert HTML to PDF and also has a PHP SDK  which makes it very easy to implement in PHP  It offers a choice of server locations in Europe  Asia and the USA PDFmyURL - offers an API that does URL and HTML to PDF as well  with roughly the same functionality as HTM2PDF  but works on a load balanced landscape and has been around a little longer   The thing that s different about these two APIs from all the previously mentioned solutions  is that - besides converting HTML to PDF with CSS and JavaScript - it also offers PDF rights management  watermarking and encryption  Therefore it s an all-in-one solution for those who want to hit the ground running   Disclaimer  I work for Kaiomi  a company that operates both of these websites

User · Answer

not PHP  but a Java library  which does the thing      Flying Saucer takes XML or XHTML and applies CSS 2 1-compliant   stylesheets to it  in order to render to PDF   It is usable from PHP via system   or a similar call  Although it requires XML well-formedness of the input

User · Answer

Try grabbing the latest nightly dompdf build - I was using an older version that was a terrible resource hog and took forever to render my pdf  After grabbing a nightly from here   It only took a few seconds to generate the PDF - AND it was just as nicely rendered as with PrinceXML   Docraptor  Seems like they ve seriously optimized the dompdf code since I last used it

User · Answer

Does the HTML to PDF conversion really need to occur server-side using PHP   I just came across jsPDF  a client-side solution using HTML5 JavaScript  The MIT-licensed code is on GitHub  too

User · Answer

Well if you want to find a perfect XHTML CSS to PDF converter library  forget it  It s far from possible  Because it s just like finding a perfect browser  XHTML CSS rendering engine   Do we have one  IE or FF   I have had some success with DOMPDF  The thing is that you have to modify your HTML CSS code to go with the way the library is meant to work  Other than that  I have pretty good results   See below   Original HTML  Converting HTML to PDF

User · Answer

After some investigation and general hair-pulling the solution seems to be HTML2PDF   DOMPDF did a terrible job with tables  borders and even moderately complex layout and htmldoc seems reasonably robust but is almost completely CSS-ignorant and I don t want to go back to doing HTML layout without CSS just for that program   HTML2PDF looked the most promising but I kept having this weird error about null reference arguments to node type   I finally found the solution to this   Basically  PHP 5 1 x worked fine with regex replaces  preg replace    on strings of any size   PHP 5 2 1 introduced a php ini config directive called pcre backtrack limit   What this config parameter does is limits the string length for which matching is done   Why this was introduced I don t know   The default value was chosen as 100 000   Why such a low value   Again  no idea   A bug was raised against PHP 5 2 1 for this  which is still open almost two years later   What s horrifying about this is that when the limit is exceeded  the replace just silently fails   At least if an error had been raised and logged you d have some indication of what happened  why and what to change to fix it   But no   So I have a 70k HTML file to turn into PDF   It requires the following php ini settings    pcre backtrack limit   2000000    probably more than I need but that s OK memory limit   1024M    yes  one gigabyte  and max execution time   600    yes  10 minutes    Now the astute reader may have noticed that my HTML file is smaller than 100k   The only reason I can guess as to why I hit this problem is that html2pdf does a conversion into xhtml as part of the process   Perhaps that took me over  although nearly 50  bloat seems odd    Whatever the case  the above worked   Now  html2pdf is a resource hog  My 70k file takes approximately 5 minutes and at least 500-600M of RAM to create a 35 page PDF file   Not quick enough  by far  for a real-time download unfortunately and the memory usage puts the memory usage ratio in the order of 1000-to-1  600M of RAM for a 70k file   which is utterly ridiculous   Unfortunately  that s the best I ve come up with

User · Answer

There s a tutorial on Zend s devzone on generating pdf from php  part 1  part 2  without any external libraries  I never implemented this sort of solution  but since it s all php  you might find it more flexible to implement and debug

User · Answer

Darryl Hein s mention above of TCPDF  is likely a great idea   Nicola Asuni s code is pretty handy and powerful   The only killer is if you ever plan on merging PDF files with your generated PDF it doesn t have those features   You would have to create the PDF and then merge it using something like PDFTK by Sid Steward  www pdflabs com tools pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit

User · Answer

I recommend TCPDF or DOMPDF  in that order

User · Answer

Fine rendering doesn t mean anything  Does it validate    All browsers do the most they can to just show something on the screen  no matter how bad the input  And of course they do not do the same thing  If you want the same rendering as FireFox  you could use its rendering engine  There are pdf generators for it  It is an awful lot of work  though

User · Answer

Why don   t you try mPDF version 2 0  I used it for creating PDF a document  It works fine   Meanwhile mPDF is at version 5 7 and it is actively maintained  in contrast to HTML2PS HTML2PDF  But keep in mind  that the documentation can really be hard to handle  For example  take a look at this page  https   mpdf github io     Very basic tasks around html to pdf  can be done with this library  but more complex tasks will take some time reading and  understanding  the documentation

User · Answer

Important  Please note that this answer was written in 2009 and it might not be the most cost-effective solution today in 2019  Online alternatives are better today at this than they were back then   Here are some online services that you can use    PDFShift Restpack PDF Layer DocRaptor HTMLPDFAPI HTML to PDF Rocket     Have a look at PrinceXML   It s definitely the best HTML CSS to PDF converter out there  although it s not free  But hey  your programming might not be free either  so if it saves you 10 hours of work  you re home free  since you also need to take into account that the alternative solutions will require you to setup a dedicated server with the right software   Oh yeah  did I mention that this is the first  and probably only  HTML2PDF solution that does full ACID2    PrinceXML Samples

User · Answer

If you have access to the command line it s possible to use PhantomJS to create the PDF from an URL  remote or local    It works really well  and is a free solution   Take a look at this example script made for this exact problem

User · Answer

I ve tried a lot of different libraries for PHP  All the listed I ve tried   In my opinion TCPDF library is the best compromise performance usability  It s very simply to install and use  also good performance in small medium application  If you need high performance and very big PDF document  use Zend PDF module  but get ready to coding hard

User · Answer

In terms of cost  using a web-service  API  may in many cases be the more sensible approach  Plus  by outsourcing this process you unburden your own infrastructure backend and - provided you are using a reputable service - ensure compatibility with adjusting web standards  uptime  short processing times and quick content delivery   I ve done some research on most of the web services currently on the market  please find below the APIs that I feel are worth mentioning on this thread  in an order based on price value ratio  All of them are offering pre-composed PHP classes and packages     pdflayer com - Cost    - Quality       docraptor com - Cost      - Quality        pdfcrowd com - Cost     - Quality        Quality   Having the high-quality engine PrinceXML as a backbone  DocRaptor clearly offers the best PDF quality   returning highly polished and well converted PDF documents  However  the pdflayer API service gets pretty close here  Pdfcrowd does not necessarily score with quality  but with processing speed    Cost   pdflayer com - As indicated above  the most cost-effective option here is pdflayer com  offering an entirely free subscription plan for 100 monthly PDFs and premium subscriptions ranging between  9 99- 119 99  The price for 10 000 monthly PDF documents is  39 99   docraptor com - Offering a 7-Day Free Trial period  Premium subscription plans range from  15- 2250  The price for 10 000 monthly PDF documents is    300 00   pdfcrowd com - Offering 100 PDFs once for free  Premium subscription plans range from  9- 89  The price for 10 000 monthly PDF documents is    49 00   I ve used all three of them and this text is supposed to help anyone decide without having to pay for all of them  This text has not been written to endorse any one product and I have no affiliation with any of the products

User · Answer

Fine rendering doesn t mean anything  Does it validate    All browsers do the most they can to just show something on the screen  no matter how bad the input  And of course they do not do the same thing  If you want the same rendering as FireFox  you could use its rendering engine  There are pdf generators for it  It is an awful lot of work  though

User · Answer

Why don   t you try mPDF version 2 0  I used it for creating PDF a document  It works fine   Meanwhile mPDF is at version 5 7 and it is actively maintained  in contrast to HTML2PS HTML2PDF  But keep in mind  that the documentation can really be hard to handle  For example  take a look at this page  https   mpdf github io     Very basic tasks around html to pdf  can be done with this library  but more complex tasks will take some time reading and  understanding  the documentation

User · Answer

Perhaps you might try and use Tidy before handing the file to the converter  If one of the renderer chokes on some HTML problem  like unclosed tag   it might help it

User · Answer

TCPDF works fine  no dependencies  is free and constantly bugfixed  It has reasonable speed if supplied HTML CSS contents is well formated  I normally generate from 50 - 300 kB of HTML input  including CSS  and get PDF output within 1-3 secs with 10 - 15 PDF pages    I strongly recommend using tidy library as HTML pretty formatter before sending anything to TCPDF

User · Answer

I ve tried a lot of different libraries for PHP  All the listed I ve tried   In my opinion TCPDF library is the best compromise performance usability  It s very simply to install and use  also good performance in small medium application  If you need high performance and very big PDF document  use Zend PDF module  but get ready to coding hard

User · Answer

Important  Please note that this answer was written in 2009 and it might not be the most cost-effective solution today in 2019  Online alternatives are better today at this than they were back then   Here are some online services that you can use    PDFShift Restpack PDF Layer DocRaptor HTMLPDFAPI HTML to PDF Rocket     Have a look at PrinceXML   It s definitely the best HTML CSS to PDF converter out there  although it s not free  But hey  your programming might not be free either  so if it saves you 10 hours of work  you re home free  since you also need to take into account that the alternative solutions will require you to setup a dedicated server with the right software   Oh yeah  did I mention that this is the first  and probably only  HTML2PDF solution that does full ACID2    PrinceXML Samples

User · Answer

In terms of cost  using a web-service  API  may in many cases be the more sensible approach  Plus  by outsourcing this process you unburden your own infrastructure backend and - provided you are using a reputable service - ensure compatibility with adjusting web standards  uptime  short processing times and quick content delivery   I ve done some research on most of the web services currently on the market  please find below the APIs that I feel are worth mentioning on this thread  in an order based on price value ratio  All of them are offering pre-composed PHP classes and packages     pdflayer com - Cost    - Quality       docraptor com - Cost      - Quality        pdfcrowd com - Cost     - Quality        Quality   Having the high-quality engine PrinceXML as a backbone  DocRaptor clearly offers the best PDF quality   returning highly polished and well converted PDF documents  However  the pdflayer API service gets pretty close here  Pdfcrowd does not necessarily score with quality  but with processing speed    Cost   pdflayer com - As indicated above  the most cost-effective option here is pdflayer com  offering an entirely free subscription plan for 100 monthly PDFs and premium subscriptions ranging between  9 99- 119 99  The price for 10 000 monthly PDF documents is  39 99   docraptor com - Offering a 7-Day Free Trial period  Premium subscription plans range from  15- 2250  The price for 10 000 monthly PDF documents is    300 00   pdfcrowd com - Offering 100 PDFs once for free  Premium subscription plans range from  9- 89  The price for 10 000 monthly PDF documents is    49 00   I ve used all three of them and this text is supposed to help anyone decide without having to pay for all of them  This text has not been written to endorse any one product and I have no affiliation with any of the products

User · Answer

1  use MPDF    a  extract in yourfolder  b  create file php in yourfolder and insert such code    lt  php include     mpdf php     mpdf new mPDF     mpdf- gt WriteHTML   lt p style  color red   gt Hallo World lt br  gt Fisrt sentencee lt  p gt      mpdf- gt Output      exit     gt    c  open file php from your browser    2  Use pdfToHtml    1  extract pdftohtml exe to your root folder    2  inside that folder  in anyfile php file  put this code  assuming  there is a source example pdf too     lt  php  source  example pdf    output fold  FinalFolder        if   file exists  output fold     mkdir  output fold  0777  true     result  passthru  pdftohtml  source  output fold new filename   log     var dump  result   var dump  log     gt    3  enter FinalFolder  and there will be the converted files  as many pages  as the source PDF had

User · Answer

Just to bump the thread  I ve tried DOMPDF and it worked perfectly  I ve used DIV and other block level elements to position everything  I kept it strictly CSS 2 1 and it played very nicely

User · Answer

Does the HTML to PDF conversion really need to occur server-side using PHP   I just came across jsPDF  a client-side solution using HTML5 JavaScript  The MIT-licensed code is on GitHub  too

User · Answer

Just to bump the thread  I ve tried DOMPDF and it worked perfectly  I ve used DIV and other block level elements to position everything  I kept it strictly CSS 2 1 and it played very nicely

User · Answer

There s a tutorial on Zend s devzone on generating pdf from php  part 1  part 2  without any external libraries  I never implemented this sort of solution  but since it s all php  you might find it more flexible to implement and debug

User · Answer

Just to bump the thread  I ve tried DOMPDF and it worked perfectly  I ve used DIV and other block level elements to position everything  I kept it strictly CSS 2 1 and it played very nicely

User · Answer

I suggest DocRaptor  which uses PrinceXML as the  engine

User · Answer

Darryl Hein s mention above of TCPDF  is likely a great idea   Nicola Asuni s code is pretty handy and powerful   The only killer is if you ever plan on merging PDF files with your generated PDF it doesn t have those features   You would have to create the PDF and then merge it using something like PDFTK by Sid Steward  www pdflabs com tools pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit

User · Answer

After some investigation and general hair-pulling the solution seems to be HTML2PDF   DOMPDF did a terrible job with tables  borders and even moderately complex layout and htmldoc seems reasonably robust but is almost completely CSS-ignorant and I don t want to go back to doing HTML layout without CSS just for that program   HTML2PDF looked the most promising but I kept having this weird error about null reference arguments to node type   I finally found the solution to this   Basically  PHP 5 1 x worked fine with regex replaces  preg replace    on strings of any size   PHP 5 2 1 introduced a php ini config directive called pcre backtrack limit   What this config parameter does is limits the string length for which matching is done   Why this was introduced I don t know   The default value was chosen as 100 000   Why such a low value   Again  no idea   A bug was raised against PHP 5 2 1 for this  which is still open almost two years later   What s horrifying about this is that when the limit is exceeded  the replace just silently fails   At least if an error had been raised and logged you d have some indication of what happened  why and what to change to fix it   But no   So I have a 70k HTML file to turn into PDF   It requires the following php ini settings    pcre backtrack limit   2000000    probably more than I need but that s OK memory limit   1024M    yes  one gigabyte  and max execution time   600    yes  10 minutes    Now the astute reader may have noticed that my HTML file is smaller than 100k   The only reason I can guess as to why I hit this problem is that html2pdf does a conversion into xhtml as part of the process   Perhaps that took me over  although nearly 50  bloat seems odd    Whatever the case  the above worked   Now  html2pdf is a resource hog  My 70k file takes approximately 5 minutes and at least 500-600M of RAM to create a 35 page PDF file   Not quick enough  by far  for a real-time download unfortunately and the memory usage puts the memory usage ratio in the order of 1000-to-1  600M of RAM for a 70k file   which is utterly ridiculous   Unfortunately  that s the best I ve come up with

User · Answer

Well if you want to find a perfect XHTML CSS to PDF converter library  forget it  It s far from possible  Because it s just like finding a perfect browser  XHTML CSS rendering engine   Do we have one  IE or FF   I have had some success with DOMPDF  The thing is that you have to modify your HTML CSS code to go with the way the library is meant to work  Other than that  I have pretty good results   See below   Original HTML  Converting HTML to PDF

User · Answer

Have a look at wkhtmltopdf   It is open source  based on webkit and free   We wrote a small tutorial here   EDIT  2017     If it was to build something today  I wouldn t go that route anymore  But would use http   pdfkit org  instead  Probably stripping it of all its nodejs dependencies  to run in the browser

User · Answer

Try grabbing the latest nightly dompdf build - I was using an older version that was a terrible resource hog and took forever to render my pdf  After grabbing a nightly from here   It only took a few seconds to generate the PDF - AND it was just as nicely rendered as with PrinceXML   Docraptor  Seems like they ve seriously optimized the dompdf code since I last used it

User · Answer

After some investigation and general hair-pulling the solution seems to be HTML2PDF   DOMPDF did a terrible job with tables  borders and even moderately complex layout and htmldoc seems reasonably robust but is almost completely CSS-ignorant and I don t want to go back to doing HTML layout without CSS just for that program   HTML2PDF looked the most promising but I kept having this weird error about null reference arguments to node type   I finally found the solution to this   Basically  PHP 5 1 x worked fine with regex replaces  preg replace    on strings of any size   PHP 5 2 1 introduced a php ini config directive called pcre backtrack limit   What this config parameter does is limits the string length for which matching is done   Why this was introduced I don t know   The default value was chosen as 100 000   Why such a low value   Again  no idea   A bug was raised against PHP 5 2 1 for this  which is still open almost two years later   What s horrifying about this is that when the limit is exceeded  the replace just silently fails   At least if an error had been raised and logged you d have some indication of what happened  why and what to change to fix it   But no   So I have a 70k HTML file to turn into PDF   It requires the following php ini settings    pcre backtrack limit   2000000    probably more than I need but that s OK memory limit   1024M    yes  one gigabyte  and max execution time   600    yes  10 minutes    Now the astute reader may have noticed that my HTML file is smaller than 100k   The only reason I can guess as to why I hit this problem is that html2pdf does a conversion into xhtml as part of the process   Perhaps that took me over  although nearly 50  bloat seems odd    Whatever the case  the above worked   Now  html2pdf is a resource hog  My 70k file takes approximately 5 minutes and at least 500-600M of RAM to create a 35 page PDF file   Not quick enough  by far  for a real-time download unfortunately and the memory usage puts the memory usage ratio in the order of 1000-to-1  600M of RAM for a 70k file   which is utterly ridiculous   Unfortunately  that s the best I ve come up with

User · Answer

The HTML2PDF and HTML2PS that was originally mentioned in opening post was talking about a 2009 package with this link   But there is a better HTML2PDF  It is based on TCPDF though it is partly in French   You can have table headers or footers that repeat on the pages and have page numbers and total pages  See its examples  I have been using it for over three years and recommend it

User · Answer

I developed a public API to build PDF files from web pages  It has a nice PHP client class that makes it super easy to use  It uses wkhtmltopdf to render the PDF in the cloud     No need for anything special in the HTML  No need for absolute URLS in images css js links  Works on localhost  dev machine  too   Currently the service has endpoints in 4 Azure regions  US East  US West  EU North  Southeast Asia   It s fast since it uses a proprietary protocol to send the web page contents to the API for conversion to PDF   It s reliable because all endpoints are load balanced   Free account available for testing or low usage  Details on the web site   https   rotativahq com

User · Answer

Well if you want to find a perfect XHTML CSS to PDF converter library  forget it  It s far from possible  Because it s just like finding a perfect browser  XHTML CSS rendering engine   Do we have one  IE or FF   I have had some success with DOMPDF  The thing is that you have to modify your HTML CSS code to go with the way the library is meant to work  Other than that  I have pretty good results   See below   Original HTML  Converting HTML to PDF

User · Answer

If you have access to the command line it s possible to use PhantomJS to create the PDF from an URL  remote or local    It works really well  and is a free solution   Take a look at this example script made for this exact problem

User · Answer

Important  Please note that this answer was written in 2009 and it might not be the most cost-effective solution today in 2019  Online alternatives are better today at this than they were back then   Here are some online services that you can use    PDFShift Restpack PDF Layer DocRaptor HTMLPDFAPI HTML to PDF Rocket     Have a look at PrinceXML   It s definitely the best HTML CSS to PDF converter out there  although it s not free  But hey  your programming might not be free either  so if it saves you 10 hours of work  you re home free  since you also need to take into account that the alternative solutions will require you to setup a dedicated server with the right software   Oh yeah  did I mention that this is the first  and probably only  HTML2PDF solution that does full ACID2    PrinceXML Samples

User · Answer

Perhaps you might try and use Tidy before handing the file to the converter  If one of the renderer chokes on some HTML problem  like unclosed tag   it might help it

User · Answer

This question is pretty old already  but haven t seen anyone mentioning CutyCapt so I will     CutyCapt     CutyCapt is a small cross-platform command-line utility to   capture WebKit s rendering of a web page into a variety of vector and   bitmap formats  including SVG  PDF  PS  PNG  JPEG  TIFF  GIF  and BMP

User · Answer

It s already been mentioned  but I d just like to confirm that mpdf is the easiest  most powerful and most free HTML to pdf converter out there  The sky s really the limit  You can even generate pdf of dynamic  user-generated data    For instance  a client wanted a CMS system so he could update the tracklist of the music he played at his club  That was no problem  but he also wanted users to be able to download a  pdf of the playlist  and so this downloadable pdf had to be updated by the cms too  Thanks to mpdf  with some simple loops and interspersed variables I could do just that  Something that I thought would take me weeks literally took me minutes    Great article that helped me get started

User · Answer

Fine rendering doesn t mean anything  Does it validate    All browsers do the most they can to just show something on the screen  no matter how bad the input  And of course they do not do the same thing  If you want the same rendering as FireFox  you could use its rendering engine  There are pdf generators for it  It is an awful lot of work  though

User · Answer

Web API If there is people who always search for this kind of stuff  there is a free website which allow you to convert html code  amp  pages to pdf  There is also a  very small  api which allow you to get pdf file from url  Check it here

User · Answer

This question is pretty old already  but haven t seen anyone mentioning CutyCapt so I will     CutyCapt     CutyCapt is a small cross-platform command-line utility to   capture WebKit s rendering of a web page into a variety of vector and   bitmap formats  including SVG  PDF  PS  PNG  JPEG  TIFF  GIF  and BMP

User · Answer

Good news  Snappy    Snappy is a very easy open source PHP5 library  allowing thumbnail  snapshot or PDF generation from a url or a html page  And    it uses the excellent webkit-based wkhtmltopdf  Enjoy

User · Answer

After some investigation and general hair-pulling the solution seems to be HTML2PDF   DOMPDF did a terrible job with tables  borders and even moderately complex layout and htmldoc seems reasonably robust but is almost completely CSS-ignorant and I don t want to go back to doing HTML layout without CSS just for that program   HTML2PDF looked the most promising but I kept having this weird error about null reference arguments to node type   I finally found the solution to this   Basically  PHP 5 1 x worked fine with regex replaces  preg replace    on strings of any size   PHP 5 2 1 introduced a php ini config directive called pcre backtrack limit   What this config parameter does is limits the string length for which matching is done   Why this was introduced I don t know   The default value was chosen as 100 000   Why such a low value   Again  no idea   A bug was raised against PHP 5 2 1 for this  which is still open almost two years later   What s horrifying about this is that when the limit is exceeded  the replace just silently fails   At least if an error had been raised and logged you d have some indication of what happened  why and what to change to fix it   But no   So I have a 70k HTML file to turn into PDF   It requires the following php ini settings    pcre backtrack limit   2000000    probably more than I need but that s OK memory limit   1024M    yes  one gigabyte  and max execution time   600    yes  10 minutes    Now the astute reader may have noticed that my HTML file is smaller than 100k   The only reason I can guess as to why I hit this problem is that html2pdf does a conversion into xhtml as part of the process   Perhaps that took me over  although nearly 50  bloat seems odd    Whatever the case  the above worked   Now  html2pdf is a resource hog  My 70k file takes approximately 5 minutes and at least 500-600M of RAM to create a 35 page PDF file   Not quick enough  by far  for a real-time download unfortunately and the memory usage puts the memory usage ratio in the order of 1000-to-1  600M of RAM for a 70k file   which is utterly ridiculous   Unfortunately  that s the best I ve come up with

User · Answer

The HTML2PDF and HTML2PS that was originally mentioned in opening post was talking about a 2009 package with this link   But there is a better HTML2PDF  It is based on TCPDF though it is partly in French   You can have table headers or footers that repeat on the pages and have page numbers and total pages  See its examples  I have been using it for over three years and recommend it

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Web API If there is people who always search for this kind of stuff  there is a free website which allow you to convert html code  amp  pages to pdf  There is also a  very small  api which allow you to get pdf file from url  Check it here

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There s a tutorial on Zend s devzone on generating pdf from php  part 1  part 2  without any external libraries  I never implemented this sort of solution  but since it s all php  you might find it more flexible to implement and debug

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Just to bump the thread  I ve tried DOMPDF and it worked perfectly  I ve used DIV and other block level elements to position everything  I kept it strictly CSS 2 1 and it played very nicely

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Checkout TCPDF  It has some HTML to PDF functionality that might be enough for what you need  It s also free

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TCPDF works fine  no dependencies  is free and constantly bugfixed  It has reasonable speed if supplied HTML CSS contents is well formated  I normally generate from 50 - 300 kB of HTML input  including CSS  and get PDF output within 1-3 secs with 10 - 15 PDF pages    I strongly recommend using tidy library as HTML pretty formatter before sending anything to TCPDF

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It s already been mentioned  but I d just like to confirm that mpdf is the easiest  most powerful and most free HTML to pdf converter out there  The sky s really the limit  You can even generate pdf of dynamic  user-generated data    For instance  a client wanted a CMS system so he could update the tracklist of the music he played at his club  That was no problem  but he also wanted users to be able to download a  pdf of the playlist  and so this downloadable pdf had to be updated by the cms too  Thanks to mpdf  with some simple loops and interspersed variables I could do just that  Something that I thought would take me weeks literally took me minutes    Great article that helped me get started

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There s a tutorial on Zend s devzone on generating pdf from php  part 1  part 2  without any external libraries  I never implemented this sort of solution  but since it s all php  you might find it more flexible to implement and debug

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1  use MPDF    a  extract in yourfolder  b  create file php in yourfolder and insert such code    lt  php include     mpdf php     mpdf new mPDF     mpdf- gt WriteHTML   lt p style  color red   gt Hallo World lt br  gt Fisrt sentencee lt  p gt      mpdf- gt Output      exit     gt    c  open file php from your browser    2  Use pdfToHtml    1  extract pdftohtml exe to your root folder    2  inside that folder  in anyfile php file  put this code  assuming  there is a source example pdf too     lt  php  source  example pdf    output fold  FinalFolder        if   file exists  output fold     mkdir  output fold  0777  true     result  passthru  pdftohtml  source  output fold new filename   log     var dump  result   var dump  log     gt    3  enter FinalFolder  and there will be the converted files  as many pages  as the source PDF had

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Well if you want to find a perfect XHTML CSS to PDF converter library  forget it  It s far from possible  Because it s just like finding a perfect browser  XHTML CSS rendering engine   Do we have one  IE or FF   I have had some success with DOMPDF  The thing is that you have to modify your HTML CSS code to go with the way the library is meant to work  Other than that  I have pretty good results   See below   Original HTML  Converting HTML to PDF

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I am using fpdf to produce PDF files using PHP  It s working well for me so far to produce simple outputs

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I recommend TCPDF or DOMPDF  in that order

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I suggest DocRaptor  which uses PrinceXML as the  engine

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Checkout TCPDF  It has some HTML to PDF functionality that might be enough for what you need  It s also free

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Important  Please note that this answer was written in 2009 and it might not be the most cost-effective solution today in 2019  Online alternatives are better today at this than they were back then   Here are some online services that you can use    PDFShift Restpack PDF Layer DocRaptor HTMLPDFAPI HTML to PDF Rocket     Have a look at PrinceXML   It s definitely the best HTML CSS to PDF converter out there  although it s not free  But hey  your programming might not be free either  so if it saves you 10 hours of work  you re home free  since you also need to take into account that the alternative solutions will require you to setup a dedicated server with the right software   Oh yeah  did I mention that this is the first  and probably only  HTML2PDF solution that does full ACID2    PrinceXML Samples

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