I’ve built a web application incorporating the fpdf library which allows clients to upload pdf files which my system then combines into a monthly report (adding a cover, contents page etc.).
Last month I got this error:
FPDF Error: Error while decompressing stream
I’ve googled it and the only people who have encountered it before seem to be German!
The error handler is at line 241 of fpdi_pdf_parser.php and refers to “case ‘/FlateDecode’:” and other things I don’t understand.
I traced the problem to a single pdf file which appeared normal but consistently caused the problem. I created a new version of the pdf by screen grabbing from the old one and when I uploaded that everything worked.
As I say I got round the problem but don’t really understand how and don’t want to run into the same thing again.
Any ideas what was going on?
Thanks in advance.
PDF files can be compressed in different ways with different algorithms, if your application is open to receive any file it is possible that you got a corrupt one that FPDF was not able to decompress. Even in such scenarios (I mean corrupt files) other PDF parsers/readers may be able to recover the file and show the content (or some part of it), but it does not mean the file is valid.
It is also possible that this file contains some specific feature from the PDF specification that is not supported by FPDF. If it is an option for you to post the offending file it might be possible to narrow down the issue a bit more.