A week and a half ago I started looking into PDF generation with PHP. As my friends pointed out, this can be a somewhat arduous process. Since I was working on a deadline¹, I decided the best solution would be to create a nice printable view that I could create PDFs from, then come back to the actual PDF generation if I had time.

Getting the printable view done was pretty easy, and once I had it ready I thought “surely² someone has to have created an HTML to PDF generator”. A little looking around and I discovered dompdf, an LGPL PHP5 library which does exactly that.

The simple example page worked great, but then I ran into a couple of stumbling blocks early when trying to create a PDF of my printable HTML page:

1. dompdf doesn’t gracefully handle IMG tags with empty src attributes. I hadn’t gotten around to setting up the images yet, so I just removed the IMG tag and that let me to…
2. dompdf doesn’t seem to handle TH (table heading) tags properly. I got a DOMText::getAttribute() error that I was unable to find reports of online. Finally I tried removing the TH tags³ and everything worked great.

After that, it was just a matter of tweaking the CSS and HTML until I was happy with it. Total time to get from start to application generated PDFs: 3 days. Day 1: create printable HTML view. Day 2: integrate dompdf and get it all working. Day 3: add the polish of breaking tables at pages, etc.

There are some quirks, but the FAQ and forums have a lot of answers and after a short time digging around you’ll find answers to most of your questions. Here are a couple of tips that should be useful:

• The page canvas the dompdf uses seems to be 600px wide. I set my BODY tag to width: 560px and padding: 0 20px; and that has worked well.
• dompdf doesn’t like all CSS shortcuts. In particular, font: 12pt Helvetica; and background: #999; didn’t work as well as explicitly setting the font-family and font-size separately, and setting the background-color.
• If you want to create page breaks, this is your huckleberry (also in the FAQ, I missed it at first glance).
• Adding page numbers is pretty easy.

This has been a huge time saver for me, many thanks to Benj Carson and the other contributors to the project.

1. I needed to be able to generate PDFs of this data by the end of the month. [back]
2. …and don’t call me Shirley. [back]
3. I replaced them with TD tags – this HTML is only to print or generate a PDF so validation and semantic HTML goodness take a backseat. Perhaps I’ll see how difficult it is to add TH support and contribute it back (in my copious spare time). [back]