When generating reports in PDF format you suddenly have a lot more control over layout and design than you do with plain old HTML and CSS (although much progress is being made with print style sheets). You can create some really nice reports on the fly that your users can view, save for later or e-mail to their co-workers for review. In this post I will show you how I generate PDF reports using CodeIgniter.

You'll need this external library to get the PDF building to work, but integrating it with CodeIgniter is simple. It comes with its own interface you can use after making a cezpdf object. He shows you how to work with normal text, tabular data and inserting headers and footers for each page.