fpdf multicell issue

Question

how we display fpdf multicell in equal heights having different amount of content

Answer 1

Great question.

I solved it by going through each cell of data in your row that will be multicelled and determine the largest height of all these cells. This happens before you create your first cell in the row and it becomes the new height of your row when you actually go to render it.

Here's some steps to achieve this for just one cell, but you'll need to do it for every multicell:

This assumes a $row of data with a String attribute called description.

1. First, get cell content and set the column width for the cell.

   $description = $row['desciption'];           // MultiCell (multi-line) content.
   
   $column_width = 50;
   

2. Get the width of the description String by using the GetStringWidth() function in FPDF:

   $total_string_width = $pdf->GetStringWidth($description);
   

3. Determine the number of lines this cell will be:

   $number_of_lines = $total_string_width / ($column_width - 1);
   
   $number_of_lines = ceil( $number_of_lines );  // Round it up.
   

   I subtracted 1 from the $column_width as a kind of cell padding. It produced better results.

4. Determine the height of the resulting multi-line cell:

   $line_height = 5;                             // Whatever your line height is.
   
   $height_of_cell = $number_of_lines * $line_height; 
   
   $height_of_cell = ceil( $height_of_cell );    // Round it up.
   

5. Repeat this methodology for any other MultiCell cells, setting the $row_height to the largest $height_of_cell.

6. Finally, render your row using the $row_height for your row's height.

7. Dance.