Editing a PDF with PHP

FPDI is a collection of PHP classes faciliating developers to read pages from an existing PDF document and use them as templates in FPDF. In this example, we will use FPDI to import the existing PDF-template and then FPDF to populate the PDF with values.

Downloading PDFs online is quite common, tickets to a concert, invoices and installation instructions are some of the regular PDFs in everyones downloads-folder. In this post I will go through how you can edit your PDF's using FPDF and FPDI.

FPDF and FPDI

FPDI is a collection of PHP classes faciliating developers to read pages from an existing PDF document and use them as templates in FPDF. We used FPDI to import the exisitng PDF-template and then FPDF to populate the PDF with values.

Getting started

It is very easy to get started, by adding both fpdi and fpdf with composer:
composer require setasign/fpdi
composer require setasign/fpdf

When the installation is complete, create a new php file and add the following snippet:



Open the file in the browser and you should see a red title inside your PDF, if you have a PDF with multiple pages that you would like to edit, you can use the following code:

 

Reload the page, you should now see a title in the top left corner on the first page of your pdf, and on the second page, a title in the top right corner.
Instead of showing the PDF directly in the browser, you can add different arguments to the Output method:
$pdf->Output('generated-pdfs/name-of-your-new.pdf','F');

 
Create a folder inside your project called generated-pdfs, reload your page and you will have a new PDF inside your newly created folder.
$pdf->Output('name-of-your-new.pdf','D');
 
If you want the file to be downloaded directly, you can use the above code instead, reload the page and you will start a download of your PDF.

 

By extending the code above, you could edit your PDF's with dynamic content, maybe populate it with values from a form or any other information on your website.

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