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Hi does anyone know how I can create a nicely formatted PDF invoice through PHP?

Ideally I'm looking for something with a header and then an itemised listing of the products with some sort of table around. After a quick Google I would be comfortable with generating a PDF but to try and style it nicely would be another thing altogether.

Thanks

Martin
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    Did you come across FPDF? I looked into it before...seemed like a lot of work but promising – Trevor Arjeski May 06 '11 at 17:05
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    Yes having a look at it now - very good tutorial here: http://www.web-development-blog.com/archives/create-pdf-documents-online-with-tcpdf/ – Martin May 06 '11 at 17:12
  • I suggest to look at the actualreports.com, they an API and a browser based document editor for creating different templates. Heads up, they charge for their service. – Tanel Sep 02 '13 at 11:43
  • A PDF generator designed specifically for invoices - https://packagist.org/packages/quickshiftin/php-pdf-invoice – quickshiftin Aug 18 '17 at 15:11

6 Answers6

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I would recommend creating an html / css representation of what you want a PDF of and using that to generate the PDF. There are dozens of applications to handle the conversion, and there is a good thread with a lot of answers here: Convert HTML + CSS to PDF with PHP?

Community
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Timothy Strimple
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    Thanks for your answer +1. This does sound like a good solution and it will help people that look at this in the future, however for my situation I need to generate a number of invoices on a monthly basis using a cron. This is why I haven't chosen your answer as correct. – Martin May 07 '11 at 10:19
  • I've done a bit of PDF generation before, it was really painful. Much easier to do your design in HTML, which you already know and convert like Timothy said. The only reason I can think of to generate them manually is if you need control over page breaks. – LaVache Apr 01 '14 at 14:29
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I use TCPDF (see http://www.tcpdf.org/) for this: its pretty capable and not too painful to get setup. I will say that depending on your data source you may have some issues. In my case my data is sourced from a SOAP interface to my accounting system and use CodeIgniter for my app, and I can do this:

$address = $extraclient->get_company_address();

// generate the PDF invoice
$this->load->library('pdfinvoice');

// set document information
$this->pdfinvoice->SetSubject("Invoice " . $data_invoice['code_invoice']);

// add a page
$this->pdfinvoice->AddPage();
$this->pdfinvoice->StartPageOffset();

// write the client's details out
$width = $this->pdfinvoice->GetPageWidth()/2;
$margins = $this->pdfinvoice->getMargins();
$this->pdfinvoice->SetFont('times', 'b', $this->pdfinvoice->bigFont );
$this->_row($width, array("From:", "To:"));
$this->pdfinvoice->SetFont('times', 'i', $this->pdfinvoice->smallFont );
$this->_row($width, array("MY NAME", $customer['name_contact']));
$this->_row($width, array($address['phone'], $customer['name_customer']));
$this->_row($width, array($address['street'], $customer['address1_street']));
$this->_row($width, array($address['city']. ", ".$address['state']." ".$address['zipcode'],
                          $customer['address1_city']. ", ".$customer['address1_state']." ".$customer['address1_zip

The full code is quite frankly too long to insert here, but you should get the idea, and you get fairly precise layout control.

Femi
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1

You may wanna look at html2Pdf. It is a php class based on FPDF and it allows you to create PDF file from HTML. So just format your text using html and then create its pdf. Its very flexible and give greate control.

SourceForge Link

Shoaib Shakeel
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1

Checkout the php-pdf-invoice library from composer. The library is already designed for generating an invoice so it's easy and quick to integrate!

composer require quickshiftin/php-pdf-invoice

You can generate PDF files that look like this

Here's a sample invoice

There is a usage example on the README. Essentially you implement two interfaces, one for orders, another for order items. You can configure fonts and colors to your liking as well.

quickshiftin
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0

PDF generation tends to be tricky. As long as the invoice is relatively simple, I would recommend creating a template image file and use imagettftext to print strings over it (or any other library).

For image file to PDF conversion imagemagick tool suite can be used (as long as it is available on the server):

exec('convert -units \'PixelsPerInch\' -density 150 '.$filename.'.png '.$filename.'.pdf');

For me the whole approach worked smoothly.

meliniak
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0

Even though you can generate pdf documents programmatically, we have found out that it's best if you just generate an HTML page of the PDF document and use some kind of a tool / service to convert the HTML to PDF.

If you are looking for an app that you can host you can check these:

  • wkhtmltopdf - uses webkit to render html to pdf. works ok with some caveats.
  • PhantomJS - DISCONTINUED, I would not suggest using it.
  • Headless Chrome - Best of all but by itself it's not a solution. You need a client module according to your programming language environment.

In case you do not wish to handle the utility yourself, there are a lot of free / paid online services, some of them listed below:

Ekin Koc
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