Introduction

PDML is an informal markup language written in 100% PHP, allowing to create complex PDF documents very easily for people already familiar with HTML. People familiar with PHP can also use it as a way to define templates for dynamic PDF documents.

PDML is built on top of FPDF, and is licensed under the GPL

This project is new. Current versions aim to expose as much of the feature-set of FPDF as possible. Please note that the current markup is not final and will likely be adjusted as the project matures.

To quickly understand what PDML can do, please check out our examples.

Note: 0.9 is out, featuring cells, ellipses and multi-columns.

News

I'd been busy with other things, but I have started working seriously on 1.0. Here's a small, tentative list of things I want to put in there:

• more of the common HTML tags supported
• some HTML table support, thanks to a patch submitted
• partial CSS 1 support
• removal of the more obnoxious tags, like CELL and MULTICELL that don't allow children tags. This assumes all of their functionality will be duplicated by plain ol' DIVs.
• Some form of SVG support. Half of it means current tags like CIRCLE and RECT will be renamed. The other half means you will be able to embed full-featured SVG documents, either inline or linked. That part will require acrobat reader.
• form elements
• read-only DOM 1 support from javascript.
• some form of barcode support. maybe.
• meaningful examples and documentation (!)
• a FAQ, where I get to bad-mouth XSL:FO while trying to make PDML look good, and maybe even useful.

That's the plan, roughly sorted by priority and completeness of implementation. The big picture here is to offer good support for the following types of use:

• convert simple web documents to PDF
• create and format documents meant to be printed
• create rich/dynamic PDF documents

Ok, that's a lot of good intentions. Time to get some coding done.