Official Resources

• Official Website
• GitHub Repository
• Official Documentation (PDF)
• Online Documentation

Advantages Over Other Libraries

Compared to libraries like TCPDF, mPDF offers better support for complex table layouts and CSS styling, making it ideal for generating contracts or other structured documents. It also handles Chinese characters well and generates smaller PDF files compared to alternatives.

Requirements

mPDF 7.0 requires:

• PHP version ^5.6 || ~7.0.0 || ~7.1.0 || ~7.2.0
• Extensions: mbstring and gd
• Optional extensions for advanced features: zlib, bcmath, xml

Enstallation

The recommended installation method is via Composer:

$ composer require mpdf/mpdf

Basic Usage

Here's a simple example of using mPDF:

<?php
require_once __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

$pdfGenerator = new \Mpdf\Mpdf();
$pdfGenerator->WriteHTML('<h1>Hello world!</h1>');
$pdfGenerator->Output();

This will output the PDF inline as an application/pdf content type.

Configuration

All configuration options can be set through the constructor's $config parameter. For instance, setting a custom temporary directory:

<?php
$pdfGenerator = new \Mpdf\Mpdf(['tempDir' => __DIR__ . '/tmp']);

Advanced Example

Below is an example that demonstrates more advanced usage, including embedding images and handling tables:

<?php
use Mpdf\Mpdf;

$pdfGenerator = new Mpdf([
    'mode' => 'utf-8', 
    'format' => 'A4', 
    'default_font_size' => 16,
    'margin_left' => 10,
    'margin_right' => 10,
    'margin_top' => 15,
    'margin_bottom' => 1,
]);

$pdfGenerator->SetDisplayMode('fullpage');
$pdfGenerator->autoScriptToLang = true;
$pdfGenerator->autoLangToFont = true;

$sealImage = 'images/seal/150.png';
$pdfGenerator->WriteHTML($htmlContent);
$pdfGenerator->Image($sealImage, 140, 200);

$pdfGenerator->Output('output.pdf', 'I'); // 'D' for download

Sample HTML for Contract

Here’s an excerpt of the HTML used to generate a contract:

<table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 900px; font-family: 宋体;">
    <tr>
        <td colspan="8" style="font-weight: bold; font-size: 40px; text-align: center;">购 销 合 同</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td colspan="8"> </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td colspan="4">买方：{buyer_company_name}</td>
        <td colspan="2" style="text-align: right;">合同编号：</td>
        <td colspan="2">{order_key}</td>
    </tr>
    ...
</table>

PHP 7 Compatibility

In PHP 7, constructors with the same name as their class are deprecated. To resolve this issue in mPDF, rename the constructors to __construct in the following files:

• mpdf/mpdf.php
• mpdf/classes/grad
• mpdf/classes/mpdfform
• mpdf/classes/cssmgr

After making these changes, the library should work without deprecation warnings.

Function Parameters

The mPDF constructor accepts several parameters for customization:

$pdfGenerator = new Mpdf(
    $mode='utf-8', 
    $format='A4', 
    $default_font_size=0, 
    $default_font='', 
    $mgl=15, 
    $mgr=15, 
    $mgt=16, 
    $mgb=16, 
    $mgh=9, 
    $mgf=9, 
    $orientation='P'
);