Wkhtmltopdf is extremely cool. I've used qtwebkit for generating server-side page images before using python-webkit2png, and that's fine (unlike using Firefox running in xvfb!), but I need to produce PDFs. So, I looked around and found several neat, simple PHP wrappers for calling wkhtmltopdf, and even a PHP extension. "Great", I thought, "I'll just install that and spend time working on the layouts since the code looks really simple". I spoke too soon.

He goes through each step of the process - installing the needed wkhtmltox and libwkhtmltox support, having to manually compile wkhtmltopdf and some of the small changes you'll need to make to the Makefile to get things to cooperate. He shows where to put the resulting application files and the name of the extension to enable in your php.ini.

Often this involves using somewhat cryptic output primitives and creating the PDF by hand. Wouldn't it be nice if there were a way to re-use all that beautiful HTML, CSS, and maybe even Javascript that you already wrote? Well, there is. It's called wkhtmltopdf. Normally a command line utility, with the release of 0.10.0_beta5 antialize included a simple C API to be able to build bindings in other popular languages.

How does this relate to PHP? Well, he's created an extension specifically to hook PHP into the tool and make calls like "wkhtmltopdf_convert" with the output type and page to convert as parameters and a PDF filename to push it out to.