mPDF

Overview

mPDF is a PHP class which generates PDF files from UTF-8 encoded HTML. It is based on FPDF and HTML2FPDF, with a number of enhancements. mPDF was written by Ian Back and is released under the GNU GPL v2 licence.
mPDF is manually installable in Tiki since Tiki15. Since Tiki18 you can install mPDF with the new Packages feature from the Tiki admin panel in a few clicks.

PDF Output of Tiki content with 'mPDF'

All Free / Libre / Open Source PDF generation solutions were analyzed and mPDF was selected as the overall best solution for deep integration in Tiki. The main reasons are:

Vast feature set: The mpdfmanual.pdf (8 megs download) is over 600 pages!
It's written in PHP (like Tiki) so it eases deployment, facilitates integration and makes it easier for the Tiki community to contribute.
The approach is to convert HTML to PDF (other approaches would have been more complex / less suitable for the Tiki context)
Strong multilingual support: Some of the other good solutions didn't support all languages. And thus, it would have forced us to have a second solution for these languages, which would have fragmented the efforts.

Since the GNU GPL v2 licence is not compatible with Tiki's LGPL licence, we cannot ship mPDF with the source code as part of Tiki. Thus, we have prepared the mPDF integration from Tiki16 in the code to an extent, that users can simply install mPDF in three simple steps and activate the feature with a prepared dropdown in the admin panel. mPDF is offered via Packages in Tiki18.

See also:

mPDF

Installation

Please mind, that mPDF does not work in/behind an http-password protected directory; at least not with a simple standart installation without extra configuration.

This is the Steps 1 and 2 by hand

Step 1

Download the mPDF library to your server, extract (unzip) to an appropriate place in or outside the Tikiroot (Tiki installation directory).

References:

Download	http://www.mpdf1.com/mpdf/index.php get the newest stable version or https://github.com/mpdf/mpdf/archive/development.zip try the newest developer version
Github	https://github.com/mpdf/mpdf
Documentation	https://mpdf.github.io/ 'mpdf Manual'
Manual as PDF	http://www.mpdfonline.com/repos/mpdfmanual.pdf

Recommended places to install mPDF:

either here inside the Tikiroot:

A :

files/mpdf

or here inside the Tikiroot:

B :

vendor_custom/mpdf

or outside the Tikiroot (recommended for security reason):

C :

in a structure like this (recommended example):

a &quot;container&quot; for the project:
     /myproject
a directory for the filegallery (do not use the database for file upload!):
     /myproject/files/*
the Tikiroot (main installation):
     /myproject/tiki16
and here the extracted mpdf directory:
     /myproject/mpdf

Step 2

Make the following directories inside mPDF writable (in worst case "#: chmod -R 777 path/to/directory"):

this:

graph_cache

and this:

tmp

and this one aswell:

ttfontdata

alternative option: Steps 1 and 2 using composer in the command-line

Required: command line access, and composer package installed. You can install composer with commands like (afapt to your OS or linux distribution):

sudo apt-get install composer

Since mPDF is on https://composer.tiki.org/ , you can run this command from the tikiroot folder

composer require mpdf/mpdf --update-no-dev

This will install mPDF in vendor/mpdf/mpdf (which you need to set in the admin panel). It is vendor/mpdf/mpdf and not just vendor/mpdf/

Alternative installation (without composer)

Alternatively, you could use this longer instruction if you need for some reason (which would get the data as per specifications at https://packagist.org/packages/mpdf/mpdf ):

6.1.3 is latest stable version as of writing this

php temp/composer.phar require mpdf/mpdf &quot;6.1.3&quot; --update-no-dev

This will install mPDF in vendor/mpdf/mpdf (which you need to set in the admin panel). It is vendor/mpdf/mpdf and not just vendor/mpdf/

You still need to set permissions as described above. This is supposed to be handled by Composer but somehow is not as of writing this.

This will modify your composer.json file. If you are running from SVN, this modification will be maintained as you do "svn updated". But if you install via FTP (The zip archive of Tiki), you will need to run this command at each upgrade.

Step 3

Enable mPDF in Tiki:

Up to Tiki 15.x (and up to 16.1):

Go to Control Panel > General > General settings (tab) > PRINT > mPDF

( example.com/tiki-admin.php?page=general#contentadmin_general-2 )

and select the path where you did install mPDF to.

Since Tiki 16.2:

Go to Control Panel > Print Settings > PDF > PDF from URL > mPDF

( example.com/tiki-admin.php?page=print )

and select the path where you did install mPDF to.

Path to be set in the input field (opens when PDF and mPDF is chosen):

Steps 1 and 2 by hand:

A :
```
files/mpdf
```
B :
```
vendor_custom/mpdf
```
C :
```
../mpdf
```

Steps 1 and 2 by command line (composer)

```
vendor/mpdf/mpdf
```

Tiki 17

mPDF in Tiki17 is vastly improved compared to Tiki15 and Tiki16 (and it will be even better in Tiki18).

See also: PluginPDF

Known issue (solved in Tiki18): if you have text with .tiki, it will be truncated. So doc.tiki.org will become doc.org

How to install and configure in Tiki 17 using the composer / command-line

6.1.3 is latest stable version as of writing this

use this in the command-line in your tiki root (needs shell access to the server):

php temp/composer.phar require mpdf/mpdf 6.1

Then login to your Tiki and got to yourtiki.com/tiki-admin.php?page=print and set the following two preferences:

PDF from URL: mPDF
mPDF path: vendor/mpdf/mpdf

Tiki 18

From Tiki18 you can install mPDF via the Composer Web Installer

You can test this with the current Trunk version (pre-18)

See also: PluginPDF

Configuration

Although mPDF should work with Tiki out of the box even on average shared hosting, when you followed the above steps, you will have "only a basic configuration" at this point. There are tons of options that allow you to play with additional Fonts, creating paginated PDF documents, hiding the source URL etc., which you will find in the manual (see above references).

Main configuration of mPDF is located in */mpdf/config.php plus a number of more specific config files in the same directory.

CSS

This is for Tiki 15, and no longer needed in Tiki 17.

There are some CSS rules in an array in config.php (starting around line 330) for simple modifications of the documents' appearance, if no separate CSS file is used. Follow the pattern of the rules already present. CSS shorthand is not supported. For example, to add lines between table rows, change this:

'TD' => array(
		'PADDING-LEFT' => '0.1em',
		'PADDING-RIGHT' => '0.1em',
		'PADDING-TOP' => '0.2em',
		'PADDING-BOTTOM' => '0.2em',
	),

to this:

'TD' => array(
		'PADDING-LEFT' => '0.1em',
		'PADDING-RIGHT' => '0.1em',
		'PADDING-TOP' => '0.2em',
		'PADDING-BOTTOM' => '0.2em',
		'BORDER-BOTTOM-COLOR' => 'gray',
		'BORDER-BOTTOM-STYLE' => 'solid',
		'BORDER-BOTTOM-WIDTH' => '1px',
	),

Experiments in overriding default output of mPDF

Reference: https://mpdf.github.io/paging/different-page-sizes.html

A4 Landscape on all pages

This is for Tiki 15, and no longer needed in Tiki 17, as we now can use PluginPDF

Put this in Custom CSS in tiki-admin.php?page=look

@page {
    sheet-size: A4-L;
}

A4 Landscape for just one page

This is for Tiki 15, and no longer needed in Tiki 17, as we now can use PluginPDF

Put this in the page, and approve it

{HTML()}
<style type="text/css">
@page {
    sheet-size: A4-L;
}
</style>
{HTML}

Collection of References on doc.tiki.org

PDF general overview about PDF creation in Tiki
mPDF create PDFs from Tiki content (advanced library that works even on shared hosting)
PluginPDF alter default settings of mPDF per wiki page
PluginPDFPageBreak add a page break for PDFs created with mPDF
wkhtmltopdf create PDFs from Tiki content (needs root installation)
dompdf used for pdf print of slideshows
PluginMediaPlayer display PDF file from file gallery
PluginArchiveBuilder
Print

Source History