Php – Writing/Drawing over a PDF template document in PHP

pdfPHP

I'd like to be able to write/overlay text over an existing pdf document using PHP. What I am hoping to do is have a pdf document that can act as a template, and fill in the gaps by opening the template doc, overlaying the relevant text, and serving the result as a new document. The template document is a single page so page merging/manipulation is not necessary.

Are there any free libraries that can do this? Anywhere I should look? Most searches I've done seem to deal with merging documents/adding pages, instead of overlaying content over an existing page.

Thanks.

*EDIT:
Here is what I did:
1. Download FPDF
2. Download FPDI + FPDF_TPL from

http://www.setasign.de/products/pdf-php-solutions/fpdi/downloads/

Here is some sample code for any future wanderers (adapted from the samples at www.setasign.de):

<?php 
include('fpdf.php'); 
include('fpdi.php'); 

// initiate FPDI 
$pdf =& new FPDI(); 
// add a page 
$pdf->AddPage(); 
// set the sourcefile 
$pdf->setSourceFile('templatedoc.pdf'); 
// import page 1 
$tplIdx = $pdf->importPage(1); 
// use the imported page as the template 
$pdf->useTemplate($tplIdx, 0, 0); 

// now write some text above the imported page 
$pdf->SetFont('Arial'); 
$pdf->SetTextColor(255,0,0); 
$pdf->SetXY(25, 25); 
$pdf->Write(0, "This is just a simple text"); 

$pdf->Output('newpdf.pdf', 'D'); 
?>

Best Answer

Have a look at the FPDI Library an add on to FPDF for template annotation.

It can also bolt-on to TCPDF, another popular PHP PDF library. An existing PDF is used as the base of a page, instead of a blank, after that the procedures are the same as regular PDF creation.

Related Solutions

Php – Create new PDF from template with PHP

I really recommend MPDF :

it is based on FPDF and HTML2FPDF, so you can use some of their functions or add others
it has tons of cool features (create any kind of barcodes, locale support, watermarks, and many more)
it has an extremely well made documentation
it has a community forum
it has examples!
it has an easy learning curve

The only bad thing is that it is a little heavy-weight, but you can remove things that you dont need.

Php – Get the number of pages in a PDF document

A simple command line executable called: pdfinfo.

It is downloadable for Linux and Windows. You download a compressed file containing several little PDF-related programs. Extract it somewhere.

One of those files is pdfinfo (or pdfinfo.exe for Windows). An example of data returned by running it on a PDF document:

Title:          test1.pdf
Author:         John Smith
Creator:        PScript5.dll Version 5.2.2
Producer:       Acrobat Distiller 9.2.0 (Windows)
CreationDate:   01/09/13 19:46:57
ModDate:        01/09/13 19:46:57
Tagged:         yes
Form:           none
Pages:          13    <-- This is what we need
Encrypted:      no
Page size:      2384 x 3370 pts (A0)
File size:      17569259 bytes
Optimized:      yes
PDF version:    1.6

I haven't seen a PDF document where it returned a false pagecount (yet). It is also really fast, even with big documents of 200+ MB the response time is a just a few seconds or less.

There is an easy way of extracting the pagecount from the output, here in PHP:

// Make a function for convenience 
function getPDFPages($document)
{
    $cmd = "/path/to/pdfinfo";           // Linux
    $cmd = "C:\\path\\to\\pdfinfo.exe";  // Windows
    
    // Parse entire output
    // Surround with double quotes if file name has spaces
    exec("$cmd \"$document\"", $output);

    // Iterate through lines
    $pagecount = 0;
    foreach($output as $op)
    {
        // Extract the number
        if(preg_match("/Pages:\s*(\d+)/i", $op, $matches) === 1)
        {
            $pagecount = intval($matches[1]);
            break;
        }
    }
    
    return $pagecount;
}

// Use the function
echo getPDFPages("test 1.pdf");  // Output: 13

Of course this command line tool can be used in other languages that can parse output from an external program, but I use it in PHP.

I know its not pure PHP, but external programs are way better in PDF handling (as seen in the question).

I hope this can help people, because I have spent a whole lot of time trying to find the solution to this and I have seen a lot of questions about PDF pagecount in which I didn't find the answer I was looking for. That's why I made this question and answered it myself.

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