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I contacted Adobe, was transferred five times and nobody understood my question. Thanks Adobe!

I know there are tons of 3rd party apps out there for doing this, but most of them convert remotely (the best of these is pdfcrowd.com). There are a few that provide local libraries (princexml.com), but they don't support all the features I need (UTF8 for example).

I'm assuming Adobe is the expert in this area (though reconsidering that based on my calls this morning). I want to know if they offer a library/api (preferably with a PHP interface) that I can use to generate PDFs on my own server.

Tue May 29 17:13:44 2012 - FYI, I ended up choosing pdfcrowd. Although it is a remote service, it provides the most consistent and attractive conversions that I found.

Harry Slaughter
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    Have you tried http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/? – PinnyM Apr 30 '12 at 17:09
  • I wouldn't imagine any large software firm would accept such a call - unless there's a chance you're spending 50K+ of a strong currency `;)`. PrinceXML is thought to be the most CSS compliant (imo), but wkhtmltopdf (using the browser inside Chrome/Safari) is also pretty good. – halfer Apr 30 '12 at 17:29
  • Ah, you mentioned Prince. Can you outline in what way that wouldn't work? It's UTF-8 all the way, afaik. – halfer Apr 30 '12 at 17:30
  • All I know is that I pointed it to various pages in different languages and some of them, like chinese, were not converted properly. I didn't spend any amount of time trying to figure out why as I was looking for something that just worked. We ended up going with pdfcrowd.com. – Harry Slaughter May 30 '12 at 00:11
  • @PinnyM - Maybe you could have a look at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15693520/how-to-convert-a-simple-html-to-pdf-using-wkhtmltopdf – mark Mar 30 '13 at 10:32

4 Answers4

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I've used wkhtmltopdf a few times before and it worked pretty well. I doubt Adobe has any products that can do this.

Blender
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  • may be you could have a look at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15693520/how-to-convert-a-simple-html-to-pdf-using-wkhtmltopdf? – mark Mar 30 '13 at 10:31
  • This is by far the most capable solution that I have tested and therefore this is the best answer. When it comes to HTML5 spare yourself the time to test DOMPDF or SimpleHtmlToPDF. No luck there! – Jpsy Mar 02 '16 at 12:01
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There is also this one which is totally free !

http://simplehtmltopdf.com

Superdrac
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I like this one: http://www.fpdf.org/

daker
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  • I looked at this one and as I understand it, it does not accept HTML input. I believe you have to construct a content object yourself to use this solution. – Harry Slaughter Apr 30 '12 at 17:18
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I've had good luck with wkpdf, but it's Mac OS only. I've heard good things about wkhtmltopdf but I've never used it.

newtron
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