README

This package offers an interface for generating PDFs using Chrome.

Notice: This package requires google-chrome/chromium to be installed and available to the php user

Install

composer require jaxwilko/php-chrome-pdf

Usage

For basic usage, you can use the make() helper method:

$pdf = \ChromePdf\ChromePdf::make($content);
// or printing to file
\ChromePdf\ChromePdf::make($content, '/path/to/out.pdf');

ChromePdf supports multiple input types, these include:

• url for rendering a website url (i.e. https://example.com)
• file for rendering a file
• text for rendering text content

use ChromePdf\ChromePdf;

$chromePdf = new ChromePdf();

// Render text content (this is the default option)
$chromePdf->setInput($content);
$chromePdf->setInput($content, ChromePdf::INPUT_TEXT);

// Render a url
$chromePdf->setInput('https://example.com', ChromePdf::INPUT_URL);

// Render a file
$chromePdf->setInput('/path/to/example.html', ChromePdf::INPUT_FILE);

// Print PDF to file
$chromePdf->print(__DIR__ . '/example.pdf');

// Print PDF and get as binary
$pdf = $chromePdf->print();

If you need to customise the chrome flags, you can use the following methods:

// Set a single flag
$chromePdf->setFlag('--example-flag');

// Set multiple flags
$chromePdf->setFlag([
    '--example-flag-a',
    '--example-flag-b',
]);

// Replace all flags
$chromePdf->setFlags([
    '--example-flag-a',
    '--example-flag-b',
    '--example-flag-c'
]);

// You can also retrieve flag via
$flags = $chromePdf->getFlags();

// Removing a flag
$chromePdf->clearFlag('--example-flag');

Chrome flags

The following are some useful flags which may help.

• --virtual-time-budget=1000 This will make sure remote assets (e.g. fonts) finish loading before printing the page. If set the system waits the specified number of virtual milliseconds before deeming the page to be ready. For determinism virtual time does not advance while there are pending network fetches (i.e no timers will fire). Once all network fetches have completed, timers fire and if the system runs out of virtual time is fastforwarded so the next timer fires immediately, until the specified virtual time budget is exhausted
• --run-all-compositor-stages-before-draw Effectively disables pipelining of compositor frame production stages by waiting for each stage to finish before completing a frame.

For more see Peter Beverloo's very helpful page.