How to generate a PDF file with the PHP language?

At present, PDF files have become the standard format in which digital documents are sent and received. This is due to the large number of features offered by this document format. Following its acronym PDF representation of documents in a portable format.

This file format, created by the world-famous company – Adobe. It facilitates the way to send documents, as this format does not present compatibility problems. Now, if you need to learn how to create a file PDF using language programming PHP, this is your guide. Because if you pay attention to the following basic information, in less than five minutes you will have your first PDF ready.

Steps to know how to create a PDF file using PHP language

The first step to create our file PDF using language programming PHP. As expected, it will create a new PHP document on our computer. For this, we will have to start with the required instructions () before which we will enter the FPDF library.

In case you are not aware of this library, you can obtain it and inquire by entering its acronym in your favorite web browser. Because there is a web page dedicated to this FPDF library. What if you launch this PHP file without the above instructions that allow you to access the FPDF library. The program is extremely likely to generate an error.

Next, we will create an object within our PHP file. This object is psychically of the FPDF type, to which we will apply certain methods. For example: if we want to add a new sheet to what will be our future PDF we will use the method: addPage (). If we want to create a section within the sheet, we will use the method: cell (). And when we finish, we will use: output ().

To be a little more didactic, we will present the following example of the above:

1. <? php
2. require (“fpdf / fpdf.php”);
4. $ PDF = new FPDF ();
5. $ PDF-> addPage ();
6. $ PDF-> setFont (“Arial”, ‘B’, 18);
7. $ PDF-> cell (50, 20, “In this part of the code we have to insert what we will include in the pdf and we can write here everything we imagine or want”);
8. $ PDF-> output ();

If you noticed, in the previous code we added an additional command to the ones we had already explained. This command is the one of: setFont (), which allows the user who is writing to choose the font that will be used in their PDF. Likewise, this command determines whether the writing containing the PDF file will be italicized, bold and even its pixel size.

To clarify these characteristics a little, we will determine that in the example used the word app ” Aria l” determines the style. The letter ” B ” will be the indicator for the bold lettering. And the number eighteen will have the task of establishing the number of pixels that will represent the size of the words.

Now, inside the cell () method, we can see that there are two numbers before the inserted message. These parameters are responsible for positioning the text within our PDF document. In other words, they determine where the information will be placed.

To complete our code, we have inserted the method: output (). Which one will be responsible for giving us the result of everything we have entered in our document. So when we run this code on any server, we can view our fully ready PDF document.