Hacking at 0300

After playing with creating PDFs with PHP using fPDF for a while, and trying to get everything to work consistently, I discovered tcpdf, which is a fork of fpdf that includes everything that anyone has ever added to the original. And I mean everything; this thing is huge! I printed out the source to see how it differed from the original, and it ran more than 500 pages. Good thing they're so generous to me at work.

Most of the size is due to the SVG and HTML formatting, which I don't need, but the biggest advantage is that Unicode font subsetting works. Mostly.

tfpdf, the Unicode-enabled version that comes with fpdf, supports Unicode fonts but they don't show up on the iPhone. Apple's PDF viewer is somehow different from Adobe's and reads the fonts differently. tcpdf does a better job (displays in Adobe Reader but generates an error for the HumaneJenson font): the Droid fonts work on the iPhone, though the DejaVu fonts do not. Try those last links on the iPhone; the built-in Helvetica fonts show up but DejaVu does not. Try refreshing the test page multiple times; it randomly selects fonts to display each time. Some fonts generate errors in Adobe Reader but display, some don't display at all and some don't display on the iPhone. It all seems very random, but at least I have a set of open-source true type fonts that I can include.

It also does most of the things I need: PNG graphics with transparency, form fields like text boxes (I played with that one for weeks with tfpdf, but it never worked the way I wanted it to), rotating text. The API is clunky and poorly documented and I definitely like my routines better, but this is done and someone else maintains it. A huge advantage. I can write my own interface routines to be more elegant if I want.