Inserting line breaks into PDF

Question

If you are using fpdf, in order to be able to use line breaks you will need to use a multi-line text cell as described here.

If you use this, then line breaks in your text should be interpreted and converted correctly.

Just a quick example:

$pdf->Multicell(0,2,"This is a multi-line text string\nNew line\nNew line"); 

Here, 2 is the height of the multi-line text box. I don't know what units that's measured in or if you can just set it to 0 and ignore it. Perhaps try it with a large number if at first it doesn't work.

Your code reads

$pdf->InsertText('Line one\n\nLine two');

I don't know about the PDF library you're using but normally if you want \n to be interpreted as a line break you must use double quotes in PHP, e.g.

$pdf->InsertText("Line one\n\nLine two");

I changed '\n' for chr(10) and it worked:

$pdf->MultiCell(0,5,utf8_decode($variable1 . chr(10) . $variable2),1);

You state that

2 is the height of the multi-line text box

No it's not. 2 is the distance between lines of text.

I don't think there is a real way for calculating the height of the actual resulting text box, unless you use GetY() and then subtract the original Y value used in your SetXY() statement for placing the Multicell in the first place.

Another option is to use TCPDF::Ln(). It adds a line to the PDF with the option to set the height.

If the newlines are within your content already then MultiCell() is probably the way to go, as others have mentioned, but I find I like using:

$pdf->Cell(0, 0, 'Line 1', 0, 0, 'C');
$pdf->Ln();
$pdf->Cell(0, 0, 'Line 2', 0, 0, 'C');

It confuses me that Cell() and MultiCell() take in different arguments so I tend to stick to using Cell() only. Also it reads like a newline character for the PDF the same as \n reads like a newline character in text or <br> in HTML.

I have simply replaced the "\n" with "<br>" tag. Worked fine. It seems TCPDF render the text as HTML

$strText = str_replace("\n","<br>",$strText);
$pdf->MultiCell($width, $height,$strText, 0, 'J', 0, 1, '', '', true, null, true);

After having so many nightmares, I found a solution.

utf8_decode(chr(10))

I tried \n, <br/> and chr(10) but nothing worked. Then I realized that it was utf-8 and just tried the above one. It works fine with MultiCell but not with Cell.