My first experience was with native PHP libraries where you had to do most things by hand, like placing text in proper positions line by line, drawing rectangles, calculating table cells, and so on. Since LaTeX was a primary tool for our editors, it was natural for us to convert their scripts straight to PDF.Ĭonverting HTML to PDF is way more complex as today’s web standards are having more and more features, just to mention CSS Flexbox or Grid layouts. We used LaTeX for an education app which allowed composing tests for students from existing exercises prepared by professionals. This approach requires a lot of manual work and very good programming skills, so we don’t end up with a spaghetti code where it is hard to find any meaningful logic between all the drawing commands.Īnother way is to convert one document, for example HTML, LaTeX or PostScript into PDF. We must know when to split longer contents into multiple pages. One way is to create these objects “by hand”: we add every line of text separately, we draw all tables manually, calculating cell widths and spacings on our own. Most objects utilize a subset of PostScript commands, so you can even write them in your text editor.
So creating a PDF is an act of putting all these pieces together in a proper order and layout. Two ways of creating a PDF fileĪ PDF file contains a set of objects which make a document, like pieces of text, images, lines, forms, fonts, and so on. There is no silver bullet some tools are better for certain jobs and not so good for other jobs. I know how hard it is to choose between a multitude of libraries and tools, especially when we need to do a non-trivial job. I tried generating documents by hand and converting HTML to PDF, or even LaTeX to PDF.
Some of these documents were really sophisticated, including multi-page tables, colorful charts, headers and footers. I spent a lot of time working with different tools to generate PDF files, mainly invoices and reports. For modern CSS, use either Google Chrome in headless mode or WeasyPrint. TL DR For HTML to PDF conversion, use Dompdf library if you don’t need CSS Flexbox or Grid layouts.
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