PHP create PDF invoice

Question

Hi does anyone know how I can create a nicely formatted PDF invoice through PHP?

Ideally I'm looking for something with a header and then an itemised listing of the products with some sort of table around. After a quick Google I would be comfortable with generating a PDF but to try and style it nicely would be another thing altogether.

Thanks

Answer 1

I would recommend creating an html / css representation of what you want a PDF of and using that to generate the PDF. There are dozens of applications to handle the conversion, and there is a good thread with a lot of answers here: Convert HTML + CSS to PDF with PHP?

Answer 2

I use TCPDF (see http://www.tcpdf.org/) for this: its pretty capable and not too painful to get setup. I will say that depending on your data source you may have some issues. In my case my data is sourced from a SOAP interface to my accounting system and use CodeIgniter for my app, and I can do this:

$address = $extraclient->get_company_address();  // generate the PDF invoice $this->load->library('pdfinvoice');  // set document information $this->pdfinvoice->SetSubject("Invoice " . $data_invoice['code_invoice']);  // add a page $this->pdfinvoice->AddPage(); $this->pdfinvoice->StartPageOffset();  // write the client's details out $width = $this->pdfinvoice->GetPageWidth()/2; $margins = $this->pdfinvoice->getMargins(); $this->pdfinvoice->SetFont('times', 'b', $this->pdfinvoice->bigFont ); $this->_row($width, array("From:", "To:")); $this->pdfinvoice->SetFont('times', 'i', $this->pdfinvoice->smallFont ); $this->_row($width, array("MY NAME", $customer['name_contact'])); $this->_row($width, array($address['phone'], $customer['name_customer'])); $this->_row($width, array($address['street'], $customer['address1_street'])); $this->_row($width, array($address['city']. ", ".$address['state']." ".$address['zipcode'],                           $customer['address1_city']. ", ".$customer['address1_state']." ".$customer['address1_zip 

The full code is quite frankly too long to insert here, but you should get the idea, and you get fairly precise layout control.