PDF Generation Module

The pdfgeneration module uses css2xslfo to generate PDFs from SilverStripe templates.

Maintainer Contact

Sam Minnée (sam at silverstripe dot com)

Requirements

• Java must be callable from the command-line

Installation Instructions

1. Unpack the module's archive into a directory called pdfgeneration.
2. Ensure that you have Java installed, and that the 'java' command is in the path.
3. You can visit dev/tasks/TestPDFGeneratorTask to check that the PDF generation is functioning correctly.

Usage Overview

To generate a PDF, you will first need to make an HTML/CSS template that will provide the content of the PDF.

In both of these examples, $objToBeRendered is going to be rendered with MyTemplateName.ss.

Use this syntax to send a PDF file to the user. You could define this as a method on a controller, for example:

function downloadpdf() {
    $objToBeRendered = $this;
    $pdf = new PDFGenerator($objToBeRendered, 'MyTemplateName', 'my-pdf-filename.pdf');
    return $pdf->sendToBrowser();
}

Alternatively, use this syntax to save a PDF file to a location on the server:

$pdf = new PDFGenerator($objToBeRendered, 'MyTemplateName', "my-pdf-filename.pdf");
$pdf->generate("../assets/my-pdf-filename.pdf");

For more information on how to design your HTML/CSS, see the css2xslfo manual.

Specifying fonts

By default, pdfgeneration/fonts is used as the font directory. It contains a single font, DejaVuSans, including it's bold, italic, and bold italic forms.

If you wish to specify your own fonts, you should create a directory containing the necessary TTF files. To specify normal, bold, italic, and bold-italic variations of a single font, you should name the files using the following pattern.

• MyFont.ttf
• MyFont Bold.ttf
• MyFont Italic.ttf
• MyFont Bold Italic.ttf

You can then load the new font directory into your PDFGenerator object like so:

$pdf->setFontDir('mysite/fonts');