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PHP has supported PDF document manipulation for at least a decade, which many PHP developers implement for commercial purposes via the PDFlib library, a fairly expensive piece of software (PDFlib 8 costs $1,095).
In his PHPBuilder article Creating and Manipulating PDFs with PHP and FPDF, Developer.com Contributing Editor Jason Gilmore introduces an open source PDF manipulation solution that is much more cost effective: FPDF. He writes:
FPDF is an open source PHP class released under a permissive license, which indicates that the software can be used for any purpose, commercial or otherwise. Bundling its PDF manipulation functionality into a single class, using FPDF is as simple as referencing it within your PHP script using the require statement.
In his article, Jason walks you through:
- Installing FPDF
- Creating Your First PDF with FPDF
- Adding multiple sections of text
- Adding images
- Adding a watermark
