Generate a PDF with PHP

Learn how to generate a PDF file using PHP.
PDF files are useful because the formatting is always reliable - its contents will always display in exactly the same way no matter where you are viewing it.
Full PHP course:
➤ davehollingworth.net/phpy
Please consider supporting my channel:
☕ ko-fi.com/davehollingworth
In this video you'll learn how to:
• use the Dompdf library to generate a PDF file
• make the browser download the file or open it inline
• add styling to the PDF content
• insert images
• insert user-supplied, dynamic content
• use inline, embedded and external CSS for styling
• save the generated PDF file locally
Also learn how to easily fix the common Dompdf problem when inserting images: "Image not found or type unknown".
Code shown in the video:
‣ gist.github.com/daveh/88ff8c5...
Dompdf package:
‣ github.com/dompdf/dompdf
Sample image:
‣ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service...
Thumbnail icon:
‣ www.flaticon.com/free-icons/pdf
CSS:
‣ watercss.kognise.dev/
‣ github.com/BafS/Gutenberg
00:00 Introduction
00:35 Install Dompdf
01:02 Basic PDF generation
02:49 Change PDF filename
03:25 Display PDF inline
04:21 Styling and layout
05:23 Images
06:14 Setting options 1
06:47 Setting options 2
07:36 Setting page options
08:16 Document metadata
09:08 Create the form
10:11 Classless CSS
10:42 Dynamic data
11:55 HTML template
16:19 Using CSS
17:52 Enable remote resources
18:13 Save PDFs locally
18:59 Summary
#PHP #PDF

[@dave-hollingworth]

What other techniques would you like to see a video on?

[@efbYouTube]

text manipulation on existing pdfs either using fillable fields &/or text created by acrobat "fill & sign tool" (if possible). i found another vid using PDFtk for fillable but always curious to get yr thoughts on it! again txs 4 these great videos! REALLY appreciated!!

[@catsapp]

dating website )

[@kunyuchang]

export excel

[@rizwanyousaf994]

generate pdf without using composer..?

[@s2003katalin]

A nice add-on to this great video would be to demonstrate how to embed images uploaded via a form, similar to the one used in the video, in a pdf using dompdf. Subscribing for this one! Thank you!

[@alnahian2003]

Not gonna lie, You are the most nicest PHP instructor I've ever met in my life! Your building REST Api, MVC Framework in PHP tuts are still relevant. Love your calm and smooth informative contents. Keep them coming 😀

[@dave-hollingworth]

Thank you so much for your kind comments!

[@collenzaligway4458]

Nice video, comprehensible and straight to the point. Please upload more. You really help a lot of junior developer. Cheers.

[@yacoubasawadogo8225]

Undoubtedly the best PHP instructor, making the trickiest PHP concepts feel as easy as ABC when you explain them. ❤

[@dawnstar24]

This is the part i like about web dev. You teach a variety of things. Not just the basics. On my first internship i was asked to put capcha on a form. It took me few days It was sorta overwhelming because. Because in courses they just teach you the basics Which are not remotely close to real world scenarios.

[@abanwaraphael1526]

Thank you Dave. You're very knowledgeable on PHP.

[@OnyeStephen]

Please make a tutoprial series on PHP object oriented programming, I really love the way you explain things

[@codeclassroom]

Hi ! You always give us better understanding. Thanks for this video.

[@gensys244]

great a clear and easy to understand video thank you so much. Would love to see a more complex form with lots of boxes and lines and shading.

[@inamrasluzd6524]

I wish I can create a million more accounts just to give you the like! You are too awesome, Dave. You're my favourite teacher.

[@GeorgeRoman]

Let me told you something DAVE, "YOU ARE AWESOME TEACHER". Congratulations...Regards from Mexico.

[@giorgiobarone9784]

Thank you Dave, another great apportation! As always...!

[@julienbonnier]

Great tuto! Thanks mate!

[@tempMahad]

This is the video I was looking for

[@efbYouTube]

excellent AS ALWAYS!! txs also 4 introducing water & gutenburg css!!

[@oscaralba5546]

Excelent dave. Thank you again

[@ilyamur885]

Dave, we are still waiting your new frameworks courses. You are awesome teacher!

[@dave-hollingworth]

Thank you! Working on it!

[@someutubchannel69]

Dave, Your a Master of Masters...

[@AliRianiDeO]

Mpdf, emailing a pdf, logging into db, a more complex invoice with a twig/blade template and multiple elements, etc. But at the end of the day you are the best, as always thanks.

[@djbenieuganda8850]

thanks it was been really nice

[@dominikkaminski4600]

excelent work Mate! :) thank you!

[@batchrocketproject4720]

Thanks, really useful and well explained. I'll be experimenting with this as my case use was not covered. I'd like to batch convert several html files to pdfs and will try executing a suitable php script in bash without using a browser. It will depend on domphp having its own pdf creator rather than borrowing browser functionality.

[@alanwilliams8622]

Excellent , thanks

[@cypriankimutai752]

nice video.straight

[@laughandlivemixedcontentzo396]

Liked you video I am learning at very short time

[@RajibAhmad]

very good tutorial....

[@ilya_123__]

Thank you!!!!!

[@jacobml4885]

Thank you 😊💕

[@mshahid170]

Very Nice

[@srdjanstankovic4098]

Hi Dave, I would like to see spinner on input site while downloading PDF. Spinner should prevent user to input values into fields while downloading.

[@mmcool]

idont get thoes lines, even if i copypase your hole code. i also downloaded gutenberg and linked it localy and no change. just wondering why

[@emperoroftheearth3215]

Thanks

[@NedumEze]

Thank you very much, Dave. Just wondering whether you could consider doing another version of this Tutorial, showing how clicking a pdf link in a web page can download a pdf version of the html web page.

[@dave-hollingworth]

Interesting idea, I'll make a note of it, thanks!

[@BaadAsS]

Hi Dave, This is a very intuitive video and is helping me understand a lot more things about generating a PDF, I do have one question though...All of my data is being processed into a template.php file, so is it possible to pass my template.php through to the file_get_contents or is there another method to do so? Regards, Mark.

[@dave-hollingworth]

I'm not sure what you mean - if you load a script using file_get_contents, then it won't be executed, you'll get the raw PHP code

[@secret_one]

Nicely done Dave. I loaded using composer, but it is using an older version as I have to use add_info instead of addInfo. I thought that composer gets the latest version?

[@dave-hollingworth]

Good catch! You're right, Composer will get the latest version. The addInfo method will be added in the next release, so I was basically future-proofing the video ;-)

[@craigc5879]

Another excellent video.... how about a video on something like twig?

[@efbYouTube]

Thanks!

[@dave-hollingworth]

Thank you so much! I really appreciate it! 😀

[@windows-rdp4736]

Hello mate , thanks for this amazing tutorial my question is why after i downloaded the PHP Library via ZIP im unable to locate AUTOLOAD file its not included in the zip and my hosting doesnt allow executing Composer what should i do ? thanks

[@dave-hollingworth]

You can run Composer locally to generate the required files, then just upload the entire vendor folder

[@karthikand_]

i am good until what you tought, can you please help me on how to pull data from data base table and show in a table format. thank you in advance..

[@ismahhjohny8765]

Hi there, I just saw this video. Can you please explain more on how you install the dompdf and what platform do you use to write the coding? Is it Visual studio code?

[@dave-hollingworth]

You need to install Composer, which you can get from getcomposer.org/. (you need PHP installed first) I use Visual Studio Code yes, although for the videos it's a minimal version so it's simpler to understand when I'm explaining something.

[@parijke]

Hi Dave nice. Why choose dompdf instead of mpdf for example?

[@dave-hollingworth]

I looked at mpdf before I made the video, but decided not to use it as it's quite dated, and doesn't support modern CSS. More details here: github.com/mpdf/mpdf#about-css-support-and-development-state

[@spifferlasting]

Very good video! One question: how to install Dompdf without composer? Very few of the projects I work on use composer or git. Zero. Thanks in advance.

[@dave-hollingworth]

Try downloading the package files from the repository directly and saving them into the vendor folder

[@marlonrettis5009]

Im getting an error i new Options line 12 of your file.. now sure why

[@mahmoudalhussain2291]

Thanks for this video, Does this library support Arabic language and accented letters? And can i use composer autoloader for TCPDF library, am not using any framework would be that a problem?

[@dave-hollingworth]

It should support them yes, as HTML does (I've never tried Arabic though). You can use packages without a framework with no problems. yes.

[@mahmoudalhussain2291]

@@dave-hollingworth thanks for your answer i appreciate it 👍🏻

[@NedumEze]

Amazing! I have been seeking something like dompdf that will, when a User clicks a button on a web page, will convert the page to pdf and download it to the User's Browser. But it seems that Dompdf cannot foot the bill. Since it can convert only html files. Our web pages are mostly .php files.

[@dave-hollingworth]

You could run the PHP and pass its output (assuming this is HTML) to Dompdf

[@NedumEze]

@@dave-hollingworth The web page is the output of the php script. True. It should work. Can I name my web page output with .html extension instead of .php? Would it work?

[@dave-hollingworth]

@@NedumEze If the output is just HTML, then yes, you can name it with the .html extension. If you want the code to be run as PHP though, (i.e. if it contains PHP code) it needs to have the .php extension.

[@NedumEze]

@@dave-hollingworth Thanks Dave. I'll have to give it whirl to see what's possible and what's not.

[@truthteachers]

Bro, its a great course. I have a problem. At timestamp 18:12, the cdn for gutenberg does not seem to work. The pdf is not formatted.

[@dave-hollingworth]

You can get the latest CDN URL from the repo linked to in the description: github.com/BafS/Gutenberg#cdn

[@truthteachers]

@@dave-hollingworth I am using the latest. The odd thing is that it seems to with the raw html script but not with dompdf.

[@dave-hollingworth]

@@truthteachers That's odd - try downloading the CSS locally, see if that fixes it.

[@devhenry9054]

Can you please make a laravel course like you have made a codeigniter course on udemy. With some real project like blog and admin panel. Thanks

[@kikowyntech3442]

hi sir.. do you have a simple ticketing system atleast running on lan connection only..

[@dave-hollingworth]

No, but it looks like there are several available: www.google.co.uk/search?q=php+ticketing+system

[@HAMOSHE]

Nice video, i have no experience in php so i downloaded the source code and ran it on a php server, it just doesn't work for some reason when i put the name and quantity in the HTML page it takes me to a white page with errors in it, is this fixable?

[@dave-hollingworth]

You need to use Composer to install the third-party package that generates the PDF - see the first part of the video for more details

[@TheGarageboyz]

Great video! Thanks! Is it possible to lock and save the pdf’s to my server?

[@dave-hollingworth]

Saving PDFs on the server is covered at the end of the video; I haven't done it, but I imagine you can lock a PDF by setting an option

[@samuelsituma8846]

Nice video but how can we use dompdf to print questions that have math equations using mathjax

[@dave-hollingworth]

github.com/dompdf/dompdf/issues/2276

[@dragonarc_gaming]

Can I get some help? I was following all the codes written until I reached the image part. The image is not showing at all even after doing the option 1 and 2. Do I need to add something else to make it work? Every videos all said I need to do $options->set('isRemoteEnabled', true); but even that doesn't seem to fix it. Totally stuck right now

[@dave-hollingworth]

Do you get any error messages at all? Try it with a different image format, or move the image to the same folder as the PHP script

[@dragonarc_gaming]

@@dave-hollingworth I was doing it on a ci4 project. I don't have any error message at all other than the "Image not found or type unknown" that was written on the page. I tried moving the picture to the root folder and it didn't work. Move it to the controller and to the public also doesn't work. Tried using different image (png and jpeg) but none works.

[@dave-hollingworth]

@@dragonarc_gaming All I can think of is that it's a problem with the image not being found, or permissions that don't allow it to be read - can you try an absolute path to the image file, and make sure it's readable?

[@dragonarc_gaming]

@@dave-hollingworthI tried absolute path but it didn't work. How to check it's readable? Using it on the normal php ? If so then yes it did work when not using dompdf

[@dave-hollingworth]

@dragonarc_gaming A bit difficult to debug further without being able to run it myself - have you tried running the code from the video without altering it maybe?

[@TheJohcker]

awesome

[@catsapp]

Thank s

[@GoodLifeFilms3000]

How would you base64 enocde this PDF without downloading the file first?

[@dave-hollingworth]

You could read the file into a string (using file_get_contents for example) then base64 encode that string

[@mahmoudalhussain2291]

How to fill in an existing PDF template, using php ? is there any free libraries for that?

[@dave-hollingworth]

There's a thread here which discusses various options for that: stackoverflow.com/questions/7364/edit-pdf-en-php

[@user-up4ld8mt3n]

error: Root package 'dompdf/dompdf' cannot require itself in its composer.json what's the matter pls

[@dave-hollingworth]

What command are you using to require that package? It should be "composer require"

[@petruciucur]

Excelent tutorial ! Is it possible to use dompdf to send the generated pdf in an email?

[@dave-hollingworth]

Not with dompdf, but you could use PHPMailer to send the generated PDF as an attachment (I'll be doing a video on this soon!)

[@petruciucur]

@@dave-hollingworth Awesome, thanks a lot !

[@sarabibrahim8312]

Can you add a video for downloading pdf file using php myadmin

[@ArielClemente-bv2qu]

How could I convert a web page which was created automatically loaded from $_REQUEST routine?

[@dave-hollingworth]

You can pass a string to the library that creates the PDF (if that's what you mean)

[@szaszattila9406]

can i use bootstrap for styling?

[@dave-hollingworth]

There's a thread that discusses that here: stackoverflow.com/questions/29985728/how-to-apply-bootstrap-style-in-dompdf

[@rasalas91]

Great content as always. I was kinda scared of creating PDFs - the DOMPDF package seems to make it really easy. Love that it uses HTML and CSS - the other packages seemed to require me to draw on a canvas, which would've complicated things a lot. Thank you! ------ ...do you know any trick to "translate" old bad PHP-Code to more readable code? I took over code of someone who wasn't really taught as it seems. The whole code consists of: basically without any real html and indentation is a myth (and no classes and very few imports (obviously no autoload or composer). Everything in one file (ok, it's three, but they're huge) - but that's another problem). I added new stuff - but I'm breaking consistency and since I'm still learning myself, it changes... Are there any best practices for this? Maybe steps to prevent rewriting the whole thing from the ground up? Should I copy the bad patterns? (it's pretty big - and it's not 100% clear which pages are still being used regularly)

[@dave-hollingworth]

I recommend these two resources: phptherightway.com/ and phpbestpractices.org/

[@babolokichibane8917]

Hi Dave thanks for the video. I am using MacOS and i get a fatal error Warning: require(/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/generatepdf/vendor/autoload.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/generatepdf/generate-pdf.php on line 3 Fatal error: require(): Failed opening required '/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/generatepdf/vendor/autoload.php' (include_path='.:/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php7.4.21/lib/php') in /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/generatepdf/generate-pdf.php on line 3 Please help.

[@dave-hollingworth]

What code is on the line that's generating that error? Also, when you installed the package using Composer, did you do it in the same folder as your code, and did it install without any errors?

[@wisdomkalu2130]

Wonderful tutorial and easy to follow. I wanted to know how you can work with setChroot() when using the MVC model. In your example, all the files are in one root directory (vendor) which makes it easy to use __DIR__. In my case, my images file and CSS files are in different directories. How do I set the root so that everything works well?

[@dave-hollingworth]

You can set the root to the parent folder of the images and CSS files, using the dirname function with __DIR__ if you like - so dirname(__DIR__) would be the parent folder of the current folder, dirname(dirname(__DIR__)) the parent folder of that and so on.

[@wisdomkalu2130]

@@dave-hollingworth Thanks so much, Dave. It works perfectly. I encountered another error, though. The page is not rendering properly when converted to pdf. All the styling is broken, and elements are scattered. The text and images are all displaying, but the formatting of the page is now messed up. Any fix for this?

[@dave-hollingworth]

@@wisdomkalu2130 It sounds like it's not loading the stylesheet. Try checking the paths, or moving the stylesheet to another location (it could be file permissions on the file too)

[@wisdomkalu2130]

@@dave-hollingworth Thanks for your time. My stylesheet is Bootstrap. Could that be the issue? Is there an alternate way of achieving the same result if Dompdf does not support Bootstrap?

[@dave-hollingworth]

@@wisdomkalu2130 It could be that they're not compatible, although I would check that it's being loaded correctly (I'm afraid I don't use Bootstrap) - try loading it locally instead of from a remote server, see if that makes a difference.

[@ABGTronic_Inc]

what version of PHP is requirement for this method?

[@dave-hollingworth]

The latest version if possible, if not at least version 8

[@IniMedia]

like it

[@fahiyangtech]

Request using excel 🙏

[@shiriajin]

Man, I love your videos and I wish your videos on Udemy have the same quality. In Udemy, all the steps where you actually add the code are edited out (you don’t show when you type the code). This is very distracting and means that the user has to pause longer than usual to follow what you’re doing.

[@dave-hollingworth]

Thank you for the feedback, yes I'm working on that - newer courses and when I update old ones will use this improved technique

[@user-ny6oq3mh8n]

How to give write permission

[@dave-hollingworth]

It depends on your operating system

[@user-ny6oq3mh8n]

@@dave-hollingworth mine was ubuntu,, i give it by on properties, read and write permission on

[@dave-hollingworth]

@@user-ny6oq3mh8n Try giving the same permissions on the parent folder of the one you want to write to. You can also do it on the command line with this: chmod -R 777 path/to/parent/folder