Question

I use FPDF to generate some PDF from a PHP. It worked great for small exemple but now i got a problem with it : it return some data which i saw in the console but no file !

ouput look likes – it’s the PDF no ?

%PDF-1.4
 0 obj
<</Type /Page
/Parent 1 0 R
/Resources 2 0 R
/Group <</Type /Group /S /Transparency /CS /DeviceRGB>>
......
<<
/Size 15
/Root 14 0 R
/Info 13 0 R
>>
startxref
22291
%%EOF

And my php is pretty long, here is a pastebin of it http://pastebin.com/ri5uAeie

My php looks correct, really weird no ?

UPDATE

I pass my param throw the URL and with a $_GET and it works well 🙂 Thanks for your help guys !

Answer 1

You’ve probably added a blank line somewhere, possibly at inc/DataLib.php.

Update #1:

According to your answers, there’s two suspicious points:

1. The Content-Type should be application/pdf. In theory, the PDF::Output() method adds it for you (unless php_sapi_name() returns cli, which should not be possible in web environment).

2. Getting a blank page in a desktop PDF reader (rather than an error) suggests that the document is damaged in a way that the reader cannot even detect it… or that the document is actually blank.

No idea about #1 (firewall? proxy? antivirus?) but you could at least inspect the PDF source in search of PHP error messages or something that does not belong there.

Update #2:

I think I finally understood what your problem is. You cannot use JavaScript to retrieve a PDF file though AJAX. All JavaScript can do is:

1. Manipulate the page’s DOM (and PDF is not HTML).
2. Replace the complete DOM page with something else (and there’s no way to tell the browser what content-type it is).

I suspect your PDF generator is just fine if you call it directly from the location bar.