How can I generate a usable dynamic PDF from a Drupal view?

Question

My goal is to generate a PDF view of a content node. I've set up the Views PDF module with the TCPDF class, but performance is awful. Not just slow. I mean AWFUL. It's an aggravating experience when viewing a simple page of content as a PDF, and downright painful when viewing content that should be several hundred PDF pages long. Totally unacceptable.

Does anyone have a good solution for combatting this? All I'm looking to do is take a single node and offer a "view as PDF" link/functionality. It seems like this should be pretty straightforward, but I haven't been able to solve that yet.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

I had never had any success with the html>pdf generating tools for PHP coming out looking 1:1 without issues ranging from style to markup to server side error with the libraries and/or incompatibility with PHP versions, package errors and whatnot.

Another option is to use PhantomJS or an equivalent tool to use a headless browser to output a PDF file for you. Note though, that PhantomJS is possibly going to no longer be maintained, as Chrome now has a headless equivalent.

However, there is a module for Drupal 7 and 8 that provides this functionality (disclosure, I am a maintainer) but it may take a little elbow grease on your end to get it to work the way you'd like. A base js controller for PhantomJS is provided, but you can alter it. If all you need is an equivalent of doing File > Print to PDF in the browser, this will do it without as much hassle as all the PHP libs.

https://www.drupal.org/project/phantomjs_capture

As an alternative to that, there is a hosted service provider with an API you can use as well (disclosure - I have nothing to do with it) that might suit you.

Answer 2

From my experience, the kind of functionality "View as PDF" is better answered with a link "Print" or "Save" outputting the content with specific html styled for that purpose. Once I did what you are trying to do, but nowadays I changed my view.

Answer 3

If you want to generate a pdf file from a single node, I would recommend the PDF using mPDF module.

Hope it will help you.

Answer 4

You can implement dompdf library in your custom module. It is compliant HTML layout and rendering engine written in PHP. PDF rendering is provided either by PDFLib or by a bundled version the R&OS CPDF class.

The conversion is pretty straight forward. Here is the code example:

<?php
// Require the Composer autoloader or use Composer Manager module.
// @see: http://getcomposer.org/doc/00-intro.md
require 'vendor/autoload.php';

// Disable DOMPDF's internal autoloader if you are using Composer Manager module.
define('DOMPDF_ENABLE_AUTOLOAD', false);

// include DOMPDF's default configuration
require_once 'vendor/dompdf/dompdf/dompdf_config.inc.php';

$htmlString = ''; // Replace $htmlString with html of of your content node.
$dompdf = new DOMPDF();
$dompdf->load_html($htmlString);
$dompdf->render();
$dompdf->stream("sample.pdf");