Question

I can see there are a few options for doing this. My question is does any one know of a way that I can simply pass a php web page into a pdf creator and it outputs exactly the same as if it was viewed via a browser? Taking into consideration CSS, images and php functions etc.

Thanks

Answer 1

Think wkhtmltopdf is the answer you are looking for as it uses WebKit to render the webpage just like it would look in a browser and then converts it to a PDF. This saves you writing a load of PHP code to organise the layout of your PDF.

Details from their site:

Simple shell utility to convert html
to pdf using the webkit rendering
engine, and qt.

Searching the web, I have found
several command line tools that allow
you to convert a HTML-document to a
PDF-document, however they all seem to
use their own, and rather incomplete
rendering engine, resulting in poor
quality. Recently QT 4.4 was released
with a WebKit widget (WebKit is the
engine of Apples Safari, which is a
fork of the KDE KHtml), and making a
good tool became very easy.

• Convert web pages into PDF documents using webkit
• Adding headers and footers (static version only)
• TOC generation (static version only)
• Batch mode conversions
• (Linux) No longer requires an XServer to be running (however the X11
  client libs must be installed)

For code and more information on wkhtmltopdf integration with PHP see https://github.com/aur1mas/Wkhtmltopdf