Generate PDF of a section of a php page once rendered into HTML and CSS and account for pdf page-breaks

Question

The system I am working on has a questionnaire in it and then shows the responses to the admin in a nice report on screen. I need to create functionality that turns the on screen report into a pdf, similar to how the browser generates a pdf of the page when you select print. Although I need to only turn a section of the page into pdf. And it would be ideal to be able to alter the HTML so that the pdf page breaks don't interfere with the presentation of the report.

You can download a pdf of how the report looks, generated by the browser functionality. This is just an example, I need the pdf to be generated by a link or button and not include the whole page (the top part in this case).

I have tried some php HTML to pdf generators, but it's difficult because the HTML is dynamically generated so I'm not sure how to send all the HTML, once rendered, to the page that creates the pdf.

To overcome the page breaks, I've considered using javascript or jquery to read the height of the div of each question within the report and then write a simple script to calculate if the next div will fit on the page and if not add a margin on top of that div so that it starts on a new page.

What software can I use to generate the pdf, given these requirements? Either php or javascript. Appreciate the help.

Answer 1

You could try mpdf and use the page-break-inside: avoid property which is actually a CSS property . I have not used this, but it might be what you're looking for.

Looks like you can add this property to the <div> and <table> tags (mPDF Supported CSS ).

Answer 2

Have you considered Snappy for PHP? It makes use of wkhtmltopdf behind the curtains to convert any HTML document into PDF.

We are using it and it works great.

https://github.com/KnpLabs/snappy