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PDFLib GmbH (german LLC) build exactly one product: PDFLib. And they've been doing that since 1997. AFAIK the company was run by one guy - the initial developer - alone for most of the time. Now it's probably a shop of 5 or so.

So it's not FOSS - yeah, that's a real shame. But the devs get to eat, you can demand service and response if you run into a bug and you can expect a good product and with PDFLib you're probably going to get it too.

I haven't come across a single project doing non-trivial PDF stuff that doesn't use PDFLib. I've used it myself a little, and the cookbook that comes with the product was very good, so it comes recommended.

My 2 cents.

PDFLib Lite is a great tool for dynamically creating PDF documents on the FLY with PHP. Or, FPDF & FPDI if you don't mind a slight performance hit.

PDFLib Lite is a great tool for dynamically creating PDF documents on the FLY with PHP. Or, FPDF & FPDI if you don't mind a slight performance hit.

It's very simple: it's not the full version, and my software makes use of the PDFlib+PDI features.

Look here to see the difference:

http://www.pdflib.com/products/pdflib-family/featu re-comparison/

Excuse my ignorance here - but neither wishing to defend pdflib, or you what is wrong with the source code that pdflib apparently provides PDFlib Lite source code package http://www.pdflib.com/download/pdflib-family/pdfli b-lite/

Love to know.

• You're evil because all source code should be free, no matter how much blood, sweat, and tears were put into it.
• Your design is fracked and you should go out of business because you suck.
• It's technically impossible to keep code secure, so again, youre fracked.

• Back-end storage system, typically some SQL server variant
• Business rules of some sort, most likely the location of the true IP of the company
• A presentataion layer such as PHP or JSP that presents/manipulates the business data
• A web server to execute the presentation layer

On the server side ...

• PDF::API2 for LAMP.
• Apache Formatting Objects Processor for J2EE
• I used PDFLib for ASP.NET but it now appears to no longer be open source. Curious as I didn't think that was possible. Goggling around found PDFSharp.
• PyX is for Python developers.

PDF is free as in speech and beer. The specs are published and free and nobody has to pay Adobe to use it.
Fonts aren't free (few are freely given).

You might want to ask these companies how much they pay Adobe to create PDF tools ($0).
http://pdflib.com/
http://activepdf.com/
http://www.fastio.com/
http://www.openoffice.org/

If Adobe folds up tomorrow, PDF will survive.

Uh huh. I'm looking at the features list right now. I don't see populating form fields anywhere. Now I'm looking at the API docs. Still nothing. I certainly don't see any APIs for direct PDF "Object" access for you to build your own, either. So where is it?

And if you are able to populate the fields, why are you bothering with FDF? Especially since you can run into conflicting field names when you merge the documents into one. In those cases you need to rename the fields or you will cause Acrobat to malfunction. (I've even seen Acrobat crash just because the same field name is used across merged documents.)

So you're not making any sense here. You say on one hand that PDFLib lets you populate fields. Yet on the other, you say you use FDF. Which is it? It's certainly not both unless you REALLY don't understand what we're talking about.

P.S. From this page we find:

Merged result is integral part of PDF page description?
Form Fields: NO

Graphics and text properties can be overridden upon filling?
Form Fields: NO

After all, why would they want to increase the possibility of someone reverse-engineering the PDF format and writing free/open source Acrobat production applications, when they're currently selling about seven of them, and all for a hefty chunk of change?

Except, of course, that there is no need at all to reverse-engineer the PDF format, since the full PDF specifications are available for download from Adobe, free of charge. And since there are oodles of open-source software that will write PDF.

Regards, Felix!

I have used about every PDF library for PHP under the sun, so here's my $0.02.

pdflib - SUCKS, the API is a pain in the ass. I liken it to doing your own dental work -- in the dark. You can circumvent this a little using the pc4p wrapper, but it's fickle.

fpdf - It's pretty good, although it doesn't natively support any sane ways of dealing with text in tables - I was trying to use it to generate PDF invoices and quotations. It would barf and break columns when my text should wrap to the next line. The only way around this would be writing custom extensions to the class.

r&os - This is what I really recommend using. Like fpdf, it doesn't require any additional libraries to be installed - everything runs within PHP itself. The documentation is pretty good and I've really enjoyed using it.

PDFLib lite
This is the open-source version. It requires you to use and OSI-approved license on your app. PHP uses a version of PDFLib. We use the commercial version of PDFlib to produce reports like this sample report.

Panda
Panda is GPLed. I haven't tried it.

These libraries should give you total control over your output. I'm not sure if you want that degree of power, considering you have to do a lot of work yourself. Note also the total lack of support for importing vector images in both (this is available in commercial versions of PDFlib by importing sections of external PDF documents).

It's exactly what I am doing using Java implementation of XML-FOP. Check Apache FOP. By the way it is free :)

The other free PDF libraries are available for Common Lisp, Python, C

Conclusion: I know what I am talking about. But I am not that "expert" as you may think about me. Here is an example of what real experts are saying:

It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

Will you argue with Dijkstra? I won't. Although he is talking about myself as well - I am poisoned with PHP experience as you do. I just aware of that fact and you don't.

Granted, you'll have to write a renderer. However, HTML does not have enough expressiveness to deal with page break situations, and other complications of paged printing anyhow.

Go figure, no one wants to develop for winblows, so they have to charge for it.

Having faced a similar situation myself, I ended up using PDFlib. It's a nice high level API for generating PDFs on the fly. Now my clients can get printer quality reports generated for them dynamically off the web. I used it in conjunction with Perl. But it supports bindings to other languages (including Java) as well. It's not free, but it's quite affordable compared to most other PDF generation software out there.

What I would like to see is a method of being able to alter in a WYSIWYG format the contents of a PDF document or simply create one from scratch in an open source manner. I wonder if such a project exists.

You're in luck - PDFlib can help. Sadly, your hands are tied if you actually want to release anything you write - Aladdin only allow you free-as-in-beer distribution of your stuff.

... will allow you to generate PDFs from

ActiveX/COM for use with Visual Basic, Active Server Pages, Delphi etc.
ANSI C
Class wrapper for ANSI C++
Java (via Java Native Interface, JNI), including servlets
Perl
Python
Tcl

There is also a pdflib extension to PHP.

You can find it here

I hope this helps.

.iMMersE

That's funny, I generated some pristine pdf documents using php *this* *week* and the pdf library used by php is right here and works wonderfully and comes with source. Things have apparently improved since last you looked, the relevant php documentation is here