Tutorial Discussion - Easy PDF Generation in PHP

[Ducani]

This thread is for all comments related to the tutorial
Easy PDF Generation in PHP

D.

[ryanhellyer]

Thanks for the tutorial.

I tried a WordPress plugin a while back for doing this, but it tended to generate rather ugly looking PDFs. This is definitely going to become more common in the future though. This is a particularly useful technique if you want to give your users the ability to download entire web pages for future reading. PDF's are much more user friendly for downloading and subsequent printing than a web page, so if you can generate one from the raw HTML then that would be a very handy feature.

[Draicone]

Glad you enjoyed the tutorial.

There's definitely a lot of potential for achieving complex PDF documents programmatically, although beyond a point there's only so much the FPDF library can do. Luckily, you can extend it natively

The example in the tutorial is really rather basic, to be honest, but I tried to explain the fundamentals really clearly so that people can go and create fantastic PDFs. What they do from here is up to them

We're really seeing more sites offer a "download as PDF" option, often very subtly - such as next to the email a friend link on articles. Just a small PDF icon that seems to be gaining in popularity very quickly.

What I really want to see, however, is embedded HTML documents in PDFs, similar to OpenOffice's approach to editable PDFs.