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Best Free Pdf Creator 2018

Best Free Pdf Creator 2018

февраля 19 2021

Best Free Pdf Creator 2018

  • Basically a free and popular image viewer and editor with hundreds of positive reviews, Inkscape can also be used to create PDFs from scratch and edit imported PDF files within the software. LifeWire’s #2 and G2Crowd’s #4, Inkscape makes it to #8 on OMGHowTo.com’s list of best free PDF editors of 2018 so far.
  • You can find lots of software to edit, create or convert PDF files. We tested several such programs to find the best free PDF Editor/ Converter you can depend on.
  • Full list of the top Business Software apps that are similar to Free PDF Creator, including PDF To Word Converter, ABBYY FineReader, Nitro PDF Reader (64-bit), Adobe Acrobat Reader DC, PDF.

Wondershare PDF Converter Pro is also one of the best PDF creators on the market. It allows you to convert your files from and into a wide range of other file formats (text, image, PowerPoint, Word, and HTML). You can even convert password-protected PDF files. You can also protect your files using a password or other permissions. PDF Creator creates PDF that is 100% Adobe compatible from any program with this PDF writer. Convert to PDF by using the MS Word’s 'Save As PDF' add-in to convert Word to PDF with all bookmarks, TOC, and hyperlinks. Now Vista Ready!

The automatic creation of PDF files is one of the most important points of a project (commercial or not). As probably, the generated PDF's are not for you or team but for your demanding clients, you need to provide a solution that meets all expectations and requirements.

In some cases, not because of exaggerated customer requirements but the library you use to generate PDF's, you'll find yourself limited and most likely in problems to provide a solution for the client.

In this article, we are going to show 5 of the most imponent PDF generation libraries that will help you to achieve those complex and extense PDF's.

This top is based in different points as how easy are they to implement, use cases, library users, functions and development status.

5. FPDF

FPDF is a PHP class which allows to generate PDF files with pure PHP, that is to say without using the PDFlib library. F from FPDF stands for Free: you may use it for any kind of usage and modify it to suit your needs.

FPDF has other advantages: high level functions, between its main features are:

  • Choice of measure unit, page format and margins.
  • Page header and footer management.
  • Automatic page break.
  • Automatic line break and text justification.
  • Image support (JPEG, PNG and GIF).
  • Colors.
  • Links.
  • TrueType, Type1 and encoding support.
  • Page compression.

FPDF requires no extension (except Zlib to enable compression and GD for GIF support). The latest version requires at least PHP 5.1.

The following snippet show a basic PDF generated with FPDF :

4. mPDF

mPDF is a PHP class which generates PDF files from UTF-8 encoded HTML. It is based on FPDF and HTML2FPDF, with a number of enhancements. mPDF was written by Ian Back and is released under the GNU GPL v2 licence.

Before start using it, we encorage you to read the documentation located at https://mpdf.github.io/.

The following snippet show a basic PDF after a composer installation with mPDF :

3. DOMPDF

Dompdf is (mostly) a CSS 2.1 compliant HTML layout and rendering engine written in PHP. It is a style-driven renderer: it will download and read external stylesheets, inline style tags, and the style attributes of individual HTML elements. It also supports most presentational HTML attributes.

Features

  • Handles most CSS 2.1 and a few CSS3 properties, including @import, @media & @page rules
  • Supports most presentational HTML 4.0 attributes
  • Supports external stylesheets, either local or through http/ftp (via fopen-wrappers)
  • Supports complex tables, including row & column spans, separate & collapsed border models, individual cell styling
  • Image support (gif, png (8, 24 and 32 bit with alpha channel), bmp & jpeg)
  • No dependencies on external PDF libraries, thanks to the R&OS PDF class
  • Inline PHP support
  • Basic SVG support

Best Free Pdf Creator 2018 Free

Requirements

  • PHP version 5.3.0 or higher
  • DOM extension
  • GD extension
  • MBString extension
  • php-font-lib
  • php-svg-lib

Recommendations

  • OPcache (OPcache, XCache, APC, etc.): improves performance
  • IMagick or GMagick extension: improves image processing performance

The following snippet shows how to generate a simple PDF and generate a direct download using Dompdf :

2. Snappy (wkhtmltopdf)

Github Snappy Library Github wkhtmltopdf

Snappy is a PHP5 library allowing thumbnail, snapshot or PDF generation from a url or a html page. It uses the excellent webkit-based wkhtmltopdf and wkhtmltoimage available on OSX, linux, windows. You will have to download wkhtmltopdf 0.12.x in order to use Snappy.

wkhtmltopdf and wkhtmltoimage are open source (LGPLv3) command line tools to render HTML into PDF and various image formats using the Qt WebKit rendering engine. These run entirely 'headless' and do not require a display or display service.

You can even download a wkhtmltopdf distribution as a composer dependency and reference the Binary dinamically in your project.

Free Pdf Creator

The following snippet show a basic PDF from HTML using wkhtmltopdf in Windows with the Github homepage:

1. TCPDF

Github Homepage

TCPDF is a PHP library for generating PDF documents on-the-fly easily and with a couple of lines. It support customization and a lot of key features when you work with the creation of PDF files.

This library supports Unicode fonts and it is actively maintained by Nicola Asuni in the Github repository.

It has a extense collection of examples and ready-to-test snippets on its official homepage. TCPDF has as main features :

  • No external libraries are required for the basic functions.
  • all standard page formats, custom page formats, custom margins and units of measure.
  • UTF-8 Unicode and Right-To-Left languages.
  • TrueTypeUnicode, OpenTypeUnicode v1, TrueType, OpenType v1, Type1 and CID-0 fonts.
  • font subsetting.
  • methods to publish some XHTML + CSS code, Javascript and Forms.
  • images, graphic (geometric figures) and transformation methods.
  • supports JPEG, PNG and SVG images natively, all images supported by GD (GD, GD2, GD2PART, GIF, JPEG, PNG, BMP, XBM, XPM) and all images supported via ImagMagick (http://www.imagemagick.org/script/formats.php)
  • 1D and 2D barcodes: CODE 39, ANSI MH10.8M-1983, USD-3, 3 of 9, CODE 93, USS-93, Standard 2 of 5, Interleaved 2 of 5, CODE 128 A/B/C, 2 and 5 Digits UPC-Based Extension, EAN 8, EAN 13, UPC-A, UPC-E, MSI, POSTNET, PLANET, RMS4CC (Royal Mail 4-state Customer Code), CBC (Customer Bar Code), KIX (Klant index - Customer index), Intelligent Mail Barcode, Onecode, USPS-B-3200, CODABAR, CODE 11, PHARMACODE, PHARMACODE TWO-TRACKS, Datamatrix, QR-Code, PDF417.
  • JPEG and PNG ICC profiles, Grayscale, RGB, CMYK, Spot Colors and Transparencies.
  • automatic page header and footer management.
  • document encryption up to 256 bit and digital signature certifications.
  • transactions to UNDO commands.
  • PDF annotations, including links, text and file attachments.
  • text rendering modes (fill, stroke and clipping).
  • multiple columns mode.
  • no-write page regions.
  • bookmarks, named destinations and table of content.
  • text hyphenation.
  • text stretching and spacing (tracking).
  • automatic page break, line break and text alignments including justification.
  • automatic page numbering and page groups.
  • move and delete pages.
  • Page compression (requires php-zlib extension).
  • XOBject Templates.
  • Layers and object visibility.
  • PDF/A-1b support.
Best

The following example how to render HTML as PDF with TCPDF :

TCPDF in the first place, why?. Theoretically, the first place should be of wkhtmltopdf as it uses webkit to render your HTML and probably will be more helpful to render things as canvas, SVG etc. However, you need to know that not every developer is able to include binaries (application or executables) on its projects or enjoy the privileges of do whatever he wants with the server, that's when TCPDF becomes the first option for the most developers.

TCPDF is on the first place of this top as it is the most easy to use PHP library to create PDF's and however, the most complete and extense as it doesn't require executable files as everything works with Plain PHP. It covers the basic requirements of all project that requires the PDF generation feature.

If you know another awesome PHP library to generate PDF, please share it with the community in the comment box down below, have fun !

Best Free Pdf Creator 2018

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