Converting HTML to PDF (not PDF to HTML) using PHP
html, pdf, pdf-generation, php
Solution
Regarding wkhtmltopdf:
This thing works blazingly fast and it can also handle all kinds of HTML/CSS you throw at it, so when you need speed, you should seriosly consider it. We switch to it recently in our company and our PDF serving got enourmous speed-boost.
At least under Linux it needs XOrg libraries to be installed - servers usually don't have them, so that might be your problem.
Problem
I am a PHP developer and in one of my projects, I need to convert some HTML documents (about 30 to 50 pages) into PDF documents. My search has turned up the following possible solutions. Among them are some PHP libraries and some command line applications. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. PHP libraries: - fpdf (need more effort to convert) - tcpdf (need more effort to convert) - html2fpdf http://html2fpdf.sourceforge.net - html2pdf http://html2pdf.fr/ - dompdf http://code.google.com/p/dompdf/ (compared to other, works well) For each library, I have problems like: - Takes a long time (more than five minutes to convert 30 HTML pages) Requires too many resources (memory and time) (I set the following parameters in php.ini: `max_execution_time = 600` `memory_limit = 250M` but things still don't work.) Needs HTML pages to be well-formatted (e.g. no missing close tags) All of these work when I try to convert simple HTML docs (five or fewer pages with little CSS) Command line applications All command line apps work perfectly and very quickly compared to the above libraries, but only when I run them directly on console. When I try to use them in PHP with `exec()` or `system()`, they give me errors. The following are the command line applications and their errors when I run them in PHP: html2pdf (http://www.tufat.com/s_html2ps_html2pdf.htm) html2pdf:11380): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display: :0.0 No protocol specified wkhtmltopdf Loading page: 10% Loading page: 33% Loading page: 100% Waiting for redirect Outputting pages QPainter::begin(): Returned false QPainter::begin(): Returned false QPainter::save: Painter not active QPainter::scale: Painter not active QPainter::setRenderHint: Painter must be active to set rendering hints QPainter::setBrush: Painter not active QPainter::pen: Painter not active QPainter::setPen: Painter not active htmltopdf (http://www.ultrashareware.com/html-to-pdf.htm) So now I am looking for help. Can anyone answer: Which PHP library would work well in my case? Why do these errors occur in command line applications?