Dompdf VS chrome-headless-render-pdf

Generating PDF documents out of your app's HTML output is a very common requirement and there are several open source libraries to accomplish this. I came across this need for my project recently and I evaluated many popular ones such as TCPDF, mpdf, FPDF, etc. But the one that truly stood up to my evaluation in terms of efficiency (minimal footprint) and ease of implementation was DOMPDF.

I am using Dompdf to create my pdf. However, I want the Dompdf project into a reusable phar. How do I do that? Do I need to leave the dependencies in the project, or can I put them into their own phar? I just want the breakdown on how to easily do this from scratch.

A middle ground is dompdf, an HTML to PDF converter made in PHP. It isn't full HTML/CSS compatible, but is good enough in most cases.

To use it, you will just need to import it to your application (usually using composer). The Github repo has full installation instructions: https://github.com/dompdf/dompdf

I normally first make a HTML page, then use https://github.com/dompdf/dompdf to make it as a PDF.

Not a plugin, but I have used this for creating PDF's dynamically. Within wordpress.

This is what I did. I just coded a little PHP script that lets me select templates and add pages, and type in markdown, and that gets wrapped in a pre-defined template and piped to a preview page. I have a print button to print to PDF, and an edit button to make changes. I could send it through something like dompdf if I didn't want to deal with browser quirks.

You could generate html using your own tools like Django or PHP and then use something like chrome-headless-render-pdf to convert your page to pdf. I haven't tried it but I think it would work okay. You probably have to serve the pdfs on a webserver or something because it looks like they are just saved to disk after conversion.