Edit PDF en PHP? [closed]

Solution 1:

If you are taking a 'fill in the blank' approach, you can precisely position text anywhere you want on the page. So it's relatively easy (if not a bit tedious) to add the missing text to the document. For example with Zend Framework:

<?php
require_once 'Zend/Pdf.php';

$pdf = Zend_Pdf::load('blank.pdf');
$page = $pdf->pages[0];
$font = Zend_Pdf_Font::fontWithName(Zend_Pdf_Font::FONT_HELVETICA);
$page->setFont($font, 12);
$page->drawText('Hello world!', 72, 720);
$pdf->save('zend.pdf');

If you're trying to replace inline content, such as a "[placeholder string]," it gets much more complicated. While it's technically possible to do, you're likely to mess up the layout of the page.

A PDF document is comprised of a set of primitive drawing operations: line here, image here, text chunk there, etc. It does not contain any information about the layout intent of those primitives.

Solution 2:

There is a free and easy to use PDF class to create PDF documents. It's called FPDF. In combination with FPDI (http://www.setasign.de/products/pdf-php-solutions/fpdi) it is even possible to edit PDF documents. The following code shows how to use FPDF and FPDI to fill an existing gift coupon with the user data.

require_once('fpdf.php'); 
require_once('fpdi.php'); 
$pdf = new FPDI();

$pdf->AddPage(); 

$pdf->setSourceFile('gift_coupon.pdf'); 
// import page 1 
$tplIdx = $this->pdf->importPage(1); 
//use the imported page and place it at point 0,0; calculate width and height
//automaticallay and ajust the page size to the size of the imported page 
$this->pdf->useTemplate($tplIdx, 0, 0, 0, 0, true); 

// now write some text above the imported page 
$this->pdf->SetFont('Arial', '', '13'); 
$this->pdf->SetTextColor(0,0,0);
//set position in pdf document
$this->pdf->SetXY(20, 20);
//first parameter defines the line height
$this->pdf->Write(0, 'gift code');
//force the browser to download the output
$this->pdf->Output('gift_coupon_generated.pdf', 'D');

Solution 3:

If you need really simple PDFs, then Zend or FPDF is fine. However I find them difficult and frustrating to work with. Also, because of the way the API works, there's no good way to separate content from presentation from business logic.

For that reason, I use dompdf, which automatically converts HTML and CSS to PDF documents. You can lay out a template just as you would for an HTML page and use standard HTML syntax. You can even include an external CSS file. The library isn't perfect and very complex markup or css sometimes gets mangled, but I haven't found anything else that works as well.

Solution 4:

Don't know if this is an option, but it would work very similar to Zend's pdf library, but you don't need to load a bunch of extra code (the zend framework). It just extends FPDF.

http://www.setasign.de/products/pdf-php-solutions/fpdi/

Here you can basically do the same thing. Load the PDF, write over top of it, and then save to a new PDF. In FPDI you basically insert the PDF as an image so you can put whatever you want over it.

But again, this uses FPDF, so if you don't want to use that, then it won't work.