How To Create a PDF using PHP - Simple Tutorial (2019)

Create a PDF using PHP in your web browser. It's always handy to know how to use PHP to create a PDF in case you want to include some way of generating PDFs in your php based web application.

This PHP PDF Tutorial uses mPDF and some basic PHP coding. We will go through creating a form that can be filled out and using PHP, grab the data and convert it to PDF, it's really that simple.

Hopefully this tutorial will show you how to create a pdf in php very simply. You can then build upon this foundation to make what ever you want!

I will be creating another tutorial which will show you how to grab the data and send it using PHP Mailer.

[jshaikh]

how do i convert a complete php page (consisting of css stylesheet, bootstrap and data from mysql ) into a php....?

[shubhamdurralrawat]

Thank you very much for your tutorial. There is a question can we insert image also in our output pdf using this method??

[el]

Can We link a CSS file to style the pdf?

[TheJonnysmith]

Thanks for the video! How do you apply CSS to the pdf before it's outputted?

[priskaroi]

Great video! Super high-quality! Keep it up! Here you can get the source code -

[jonor]

Later version of mpdf, object is created by $mpdf = new mPDF() Took me a while to figure that out. Great video though

[francisseneve]

I have a problem Error loading the pdf document. Please I need a help!

[Nazmul.Hassan]

Hey Bro. Can You Make A Good Looking Invoice Using PHP, MySql. Which one Will Be Printable and automatically will be Saved on Data base. With Some Mathematical Functionality Like Total, Discount, Random Invoice Number Etc. Thanks. It Will Be very Helpful For Us.

[dontbeafraid]

Perfect.. Btw I also want to know how can I built a pdf form, then extract or store the data from the form to mysql. Then in if i want to display these data back to form so people can download it as pdf.. I reall have to know this for my project. Thanks and appreciate if you can help me

[mediablokeconsulting]

Really great tutorial. I wonder if this can be used to create a customizable flyer. Maybe give the user a couple of editable text fields, and then allow them to download the file as a pdf

[bsskll]

Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Class "Mpdf\Mpdf" not found in Stack trace: #0 {main} thrown in on line 10

[MJ-klqs]

Hi, thanks for the tutorial!
When i submit the form, i get this error:

Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function Mpdf\mb_regex_encoding() in Stack trace: #0 Mpdf\Mpdf->__construct() #1 {main} thrown in on line 1125

Do you have any idea how to fix this?

[lukaslindvai]

what can I do with error"

: Composer detected issues in your platform: Your Composer dependencies require a PHP version ">= 7.1.0". You are running 5.6.0. in  on line

[mathsmagician]

sorry for disturbing you again, but how would you be able embed, this pdf on another page, with out downloading. I am making a payslip generation website, and I want it to display the generated payslip, under the submit button, after the user has entered they pay rates.
Thanks

[lukaslindvai]

I am using Macbook, I installed somehow composer with instructions I have found on website, but cant run it in terminal console, also in sublinetext dont have the terminal, how to install into?

[SolidForge]

I am using axios to send some of my Javascript variables to the PHP file. How would you do it then? My problem is that I'm using axios.get to send the variables to PHP but that doesn't work with the form submission.

[messMed]

Thank you very much cordially it was Cleary and simple 🙂

[marky]

Very helpful video. Thank you so much.

[carlosdenis]

Wich version of Php do you use? i tried that library with Php 7.3.2 and i'm getting a blank page :( any suggestions?

[usermiamiusa]

Great Video, one question, is there any way to save the pdf when you create the pdf and not download manually?