README

A PDF writer with no dependencies. Invoices, statements, receipts and reports — tables, vector logos, multi-page flow, and VAT-compliant templates — in about 2,000 lines of PHP.

Why

Generating an invoice usually means one of three things: shelling out to wkhtmltopdf (a binary you now have to install, sandbox and keep patched), pulling in Dompdf and its dependency tree, or paying for an API to render a document that never leaves your own server.

This writes the PDF directly. It covers what a business document actually needs — text flow, tables, rules, a vector logo, page breaks — and nothing else. No HTML engine, no font embedding, no image codecs.

Features

📄 Real multi-page flow — content breaks across pages, with repeated headers and footers.
📊 Tables — proportional columns, alignment, striping, and headers repeated after a break.
✒️ Vector logos — an SVG path becomes PDF path operators, sharp at any zoom, a few hundred bytes.
🧾 Templates — Invoice, Statement and Receipt, ready to fill in.
🇪🇺 VAT-compliant — reverse charge, intra-community supply, export and small-business treatments with the required wording.
🌍 11 languages — or wire it to your framework's translator.
🔒 Injection-safe — customer names and product titles cannot escape the content stream.
🪶 Zero dependencies — no Composer packages, no binaries, no ext-gd.

Requirements

PHP 8.5+

Installation

composer require sugarcommerce/text-pdf

A document from scratch

use SugarCommerce\TextPdf\{Document, Font, Color, PageSize};

$pdf = new Document( size: PageSize::A4, margin: 56.0 );

$pdf->heading( 'Monthly Report' )
    ->gap( 8 )
    ->text( 'Generated ' . date( 'j F Y' ), color: Color::grey( 120 ) )
    ->rule()
    ->text( $long_paragraph );        // wraps and breaks across pages

$pdf->save( '/tmp/report.pdf', [ 'Title' => 'Monthly Report' ] );

render() returns the bytes instead, for streaming to a browser or handing to a mailer. Pass 'CreationDate' => $timestamp in the metadata and the same document renders to the same bytes every time — for a content-addressed store or a snapshot test.

Metadata outside plain ASCII is written as UTF-16, so a title keeps its em dash and an author name keeps letters the page fonts cannot draw.

Layout

$pdf->text( $text, size: 10.0, font: Font::HelveticaBold, align: Align::Right );
$pdf->columns( [ 'Left', 'Middle', 'Right' ], [ 0.5, 0.3, 0.2 ] );
$pdf->rule();
$pdf->gap( 12 );
$pdf->page_break();
$pdf->break_if_needed( 80 );   // break only if 80pt won't fit

Two positioned primitives, for the places a flowing paragraph won't do:

// Aligned inside a box, advancing the cursor.
$pdf->cell( 'Total due', $pdf->left(), $pdf->content_width(), align: Align::Right );

// The same, vertically centred inside a band of a given height —
// which is how a totals row lines up with its background.
$pdf->banded( '€1,240.00', $pdf->left(), $pdf->content_width(), band_height: 26.0 );

// Absolute placement, no cursor movement — for a footer.
$pdf->text_at( 'Page 1', $pdf->right() - 40, 30, 8.0 );

Repeating chrome

$pdf->on_each_page( function ( Document $pdf, int $page ): void {
    $pdf->text_at( 'Page ' . $page, $pdf->right() - 40, 30, 8.0 );
} );

Tables

use SugarCommerce\TextPdf\{Table, Align};

( new Table( [ 'Date', 'Description', 'Amount' ] ) )
    ->widths( [ 0.2, 0.6, 0.2 ] )
    ->align( [ 2 => Align::Right ] )
    ->striped()
    ->rows( $rows )
    ->draw( $pdf );

Headers repeat on every page the table spills onto — which is the part that is tedious to get right by hand.

Logos

use SugarCommerce\TextPdf\Svg;

$path = Svg::to_pdf_path( $svg_d_attribute, scale: 0.4, height: 100.0 );
$pdf->svg_path( $path, $pdf->left(), $pdf->cursor() - 40 );

Takes the d attribute of an SVG <path>. Supports M L H V C S Q T Z, absolute and relative; arcs (A) are approximated. A value that is not a path — prose, or a hostile string — produces nothing rather than random vectors.

Templates

The reason this package exists. Fill in a struct, get a document.

use SugarCommerce\TextPdf\Templates\{Invoice, Branding, Party, LineItem};

$invoice = new Invoice(
    branding: new Branding(
        name: 'Acme Ltd',
        tagline: 'Digital goods',
        logo_path: $svg_path_data,
        address: [ '12 Example Street', 'Dublin 2', 'Ireland' ],
    ),
    number: 'INV-2026-0042',
    from: new Party( 'Acme Ltd', [ '12 Example Street', 'Dublin 2' ], tax_id: 'IE1234567X' ),
    to:   new Party( 'Kunde GmbH', [ 'Hauptstraße 1', '10115 Berlin' ], tax_id: 'DE123456789' ),
    items: [
        new LineItem( 'Annual licence', '€1,000.00', quantity: '1' ),
        new LineItem( 'Priority support', '€240.00' ),
    ],
    totals: [ 'Subtotal' => '€1,240.00', 'VAT' => '€0.00' ],
    total:  [ 'Total due' => '€1,240.00' ],
    details: [ 'Issued' => '1 August 2026', 'Due' => '31 August 2026' ],
);

$invoice->save( '/tmp/invoice.pdf' );

Statement (multi-page ledger with a running balance) and Receipt (A5, for a completed sale) follow the same shape.

Every label/value block also accepts a list of pairs — [ [ 'Discount', '-1.00' ], [ 'Discount', '-2.00' ] ] — which is what a loop tends to build, and the only way to write the same label twice.

Documents are monochrome by default. It is the look that ages best, it photocopies and faxes without loss, and it never clashes with a customer's own branding — set an accent on Branding if you want colour.

VAT

use SugarCommerce\TextPdf\Templates\{VatTreatment, VatLine};

new Invoice(
    // …
    vat: VatTreatment::ReverseCharge,
    vat_lines: [ new VatLine( rate: '0%', net: '€1,240.00', vat: '€0.00' ) ],
    supply_date: '1 August 2026',
    german_notes: true,
);

Treatment	Adds
`Standard`	Rate table
`ReverseCharge`	Article 196 wording, both VAT numbers required
`IntraCommunitySupply`	Article 138 exemption wording
`Export`	Third-country exemption
`SmallBusiness`	§19 UStG small-business notice
`Exempt`	General exemption wording

$invoice->compliance_warnings();   // what's missing before this is issuable

That last one is worth calling: it checks the things §14 UStG requires — both VAT numbers on a reverse-charge invoice, a supply date, a sequential number — and tells you which are absent, rather than producing a document that looks fine and isn't valid.

Languages

use SugarCommerce\TextPdf\Templates\Language;

new Invoice( /* … */, translator: Language::German );
Language::from_locale( 'de_DE' );

English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish.

The list stops there for a concrete reason: the base-14 PDF fonts are WinAnsi-encoded, so a language needing characters outside Latin-1 — Polish, Czech, Greek, Russian — cannot be rendered without embedding a font, and a shipped translation that prints as question marks is worse than no translation. A test asserts every shipped phrase survives the transcode byte for byte.

For any other language, or to use your framework's translations:

use SugarCommerce\TextPdf\Templates\Translations;

new Invoice( /* … */, translator: new Translations(
    fn( string $key, string $default ): string => __( $default, 'my-plugin' ),
    fallback: Language::English,
) );

Works with WordPress __(), Laravel trans(), Symfony's translator, or plain gettext.

Fonts

Helvetica, Helvetica-Bold and Courier — three of the base-14 fonts every reader is required to have, so nothing is embedded and a document is a few kilobytes. WinAnsi (Latin-1) coverage; characters outside it degrade to ?.

If you need CJK, Cyrillic, Greek or Arabic, you need font embedding, and you need a different library.

Security

An invoice is assembled from customer-supplied names, addresses and product titles. A ) in any of them would close the string literal and turn the rest into content-stream operators — so every value is escaped, control characters are stripped, and non-finite dimensions are clamped before they can write INF into a stream. See SECURITY.md.

What it does not do

No raster images (no JPEG or PNG embedding)
No font embedding, so no non-Latin scripts
No HTML or CSS
No forms, annotations, encryption or digital signatures
No reading or editing of existing PDFs

For anything on that list, use a full library. This one is for documents you generate.

Testing

composer install
composer test

150 tests, 1,349 assertions — the cross-reference table byte-offsets, page-break arithmetic, table pagination, SVG conversion, every VAT treatment's required wording, the Latin-1 boundary for all 11 languages, and the injection cases.

License

GPL-2.0-or-later

sugarcommerce / text-pdf

Package info

Security

Statistics

README

Why

Features

Requirements

Installation

A document from scratch

Layout

Repeating chrome

Tables

Logos

Templates

VAT

Languages

Fonts

Security

What it does not do

Testing

License