On his site Oscar Merida has shared a post showing how to create a ZIP file and stream the response in a Silex-based application using the DOMPDF library and PHP's ZipArchive functionality.

Creating a zip file is easy and Rob Allen has you covered on that front to get you started. I needed to do this to create a zip file of PDF files generated by Dompdf. It turns out, you can add files to a ZipArchive object without actually creating the file if you can get the contents as a string.

The post includes the code to create the DOMPDF instance, load the HTML and render the result. From there the ZipArchive takes over and creates the archive from the PDF result. Finally the code takes the ZIP archive as input and pushes it out with a custom header to tell the browser to download it and streams back the raw ZIP contents.

On the Pineco.de site they've posted a tutorial showing you how to use the Laravel framework to generate PDFs with content provided from the system. To accomplish the content-to-PDF conversion, they make use of the dompdf library.

PDF generation is a core feature when our app contains invoicing or services that require a downloadable version of an information schema. Like in many other situations, a simple solution would do it instead of a full-featured package. Let’s see how to render PDFs easily.

Once the package is pulled in via Composer they add in a custom configuration to handle some of the basic settings including the paths to the fonts, the paper size and what DPI to use to render the final product. With that in place the post starts in on creating the custom PDF service, extending the Dompdf class and adding in a bit more Laravel-specific functionality for the service. After explaining this code they move on to updating the container to include the service via a provider and show the creation of a simple PDF controller. This controller uses the service to generate PDF output from the data in their invoice object and stream the results directly back to the client.

The SitePoint PHP blog has another tutorial posted from author Christopher Pitt looking at writing async libraries with PHP. In this particular article he focuses on just one of many tasks an asynchronous library could perform: converting HTML to PDF documents.

I can barely remember a conference where the topic of asynchronous PHP wasn’t discussed. I am pleased that it’s so frequently spoken about these days. There’s a secret these speakers aren’t telling, though: "Making asynchronous servers, resolving domain names, interacting with file systems: these are the easy things. Making your own asynchronous libraries is hard. And it’s where you spend most of your time!"

The reason those easy things are easy is because they were the proof of concept – to make async PHP competitive with NodeJS. [...] Today, we’re going to look at a few ways to make your application code work well in an asynchronous architecture. Fret not – your code can still work in a synchronous architecture, so you don’t have to give anything up to learn this new skill. Apart from a bit of time…

He starts with some theory about things in the async world including callbacks, promises and what they might look like in PHP-land. He then starts in on the creation of the PDF files, creating a "Driver" class to handle some of the logic and using the Dompdf library to do the heavy lifting (the conversion from HTML to PDF). He walks through the code required for this class then moves on to the code, using the Amp project, to handle the async operations. He then creates a simple set of web accessible endpoints that call the Driver class with some basic attributes and performing the conversion. He ends the post talking about porting the parallel driver to other systems (such as ReactPHP) and a few simple steps if you need to move back to the synchronous world.

On PHPMaster.com there's a new tutorial from Shameer C showing you how to use Dompdf to convert HTML to PDFs. The handy library makes it (relatively) simple to automatically generate the documents without the need to know the internal PDF file structure.

PDF is a standard format originally created by Adobe for representing text and images in a fixed-layout document. It’s not uncommon for a web application to support downloading data, such as invoices or reports, in PDF format, so in this article we’ll go through how we can easily generate PDF documents using PHP.

He starts off with the installation (via Composer) and the creation of a simple "Hello World" document, showing how to "stream" it into a PDF file. He also includes some more advanced usage - loading an external HTML, drawing lines, changing fonts, adding page numbers and additional text to the page.

Raymond Kolbe has a recent post to his blog about using the DOMPDF library to generate PDFs in a Zend Framework 2 application.

If you’re using Zend Framework 2 (beta 4) and need to easily generate PDFs, and you’d like to generate those PDFs from an HTML template, then boy do I have some good news for you! For those of you who have dealt with generating dynamic PDFs, you know how much of a pain in the ass it can be (e.g. dealing with x, y coordinates, word-wrap (or lack of), etc.). There are a few options out there, some paid, some free, but none of them are as nice as DOMPDF (simple API, powerful, and free). The true power behind DOMPDF comes from rendering standard HTML/CSS files instead of having to write ugly and unmanageable code.

He includes a simple example showing how to use the library to create a basic PDF document (containing an HTML string) and how to port that same thing over to work in ZF2 via a custom DOMPDFModule (a ViewModel). You can find out more about this module in it's README on github.