On the Perplexed Labs blog today Matt has this new post looking at a common issue developers face when they're trying to make their site easier for users to get their information off a site and onto their local machines - converting HTML over to PHP (using wkhtmltopdf).

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.