PHP is an interpreted server-side scripting language. This means you write PHP code, upload it to a web server, and execute it with an interpreter. PHP is typically used with a web server like Apache or nginx to serve dynamic content. However, PHP can also be used to build powerful command-line applications (just like bash, Ruby, Python, and so on) there are many commnad line PHP pdf library available at the moment . Many PHP developers don’t realize this and miss out on a really exciting feature. Not you, though.

In this article, i have shared 5 best OpenSource PHP pdf generation libraries. these libraries can make your pdf generation more productive.

1. snappy

Snappy is a PHP pdf library allowing thumbnail, snapshot or PDF generation from a url or a html page. It uses the excellent webkit-based wkhtmltopdf and wkhtmltoimage available on OSX, linux, windows.

Github stats

[gitrepo author=”knpLabs” repo=”snappy”]

 

If you want to generate table of contents and you want to use custom XSL stylesheet, do the following:

php pdf library

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2. Wkhtml to pdf

wkhtmltopdf and wkhtmltoimage are command line tools to render HTML into PDF and various image formats using the QT Webkit rendering engine. These run entirely “headless” and do not require a display or display service.

Github stats

[gitrepo author=”wkhtmltopdf” repo=”wkhtmltopdf”]

 

View on Github

3. Mpdf

mPDF is a PHP pdf library which generates PDF files from UTF-8 encoded HTML. with a number of enhancements. mPDF is released under the GNU GPL v2 licence.

Github stats

[gitrepo author=”mpdf” repo=”mpdf”]

 

The simplest usage (since version 7.0) of the library would be as follows:

php pdf library

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4.Fpdf

This is a yet another html to pdf converter for php. This package uses wkhtmltopdf as a third-party tool so proc_*() functions have to be enabled in your php configurations and wkhtmltopdf tool should be installed in your machine.

Github stats

[gitrepo author=”cangelis” repo=”php-pdf”]

 

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5. HTML2PdF

Html2Pdf is a HTML to PDF converter written in PHP, and compatible with PHP 5.4 to 7.2. It allows the conversion of valid HTML in PDF format, to generate documents like invoices, documentation.

Github stats

[gitrepo author=”spipu” repo=”html2pdf”]

 

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