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<html><head><title>html2ps/html2pdf FAQ</title><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" medial="all" title="Default" href="css/help.css"/></head><body><h1>html2ps/pdf FAQ</h1><a href="index.html">Back to table of contents</a><ul><li><a href="#installation">Installation</a><ul><li><a href="#installation-utilities">Does html2ps require any external utilities like ghostscript?</a></li><li><a href="#installation-commandline">Can I call this script from the command line?</a></li><li><a href="#installation-version">How can I determine the script version?</a></li></ul></li><li><a href="#nooutput">No output at all. Broken output.</a><ul><li><a href="#nooutput-regexp">I'm getting "Warning: DOMDocument::loadXML() [function.DOMDocument-loadXML]: Empty string supplied as input" error message in PHP 5.2.0</a></li><li><a href="#nooutput-utf8">Warning: DOMDocument::loadXML() [function.DOMDocument-loadXML]: Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding .... </a></li><li><a href="#nooutput-php442">HTML2PS returns blank page. There's some strange messages in PHP error log…</a></li><li><a href="#nooutput-memory">All I'm getting is a blank page; no error messages in PHP error log. Whats happened?</a></li><li><a href="#nooutput-memory2">I got the following error message: <tt>Fatal error: Allowed memory size of … bytes exhausted (tried to allocate … bytes) in&hellip</tt></a></li><li><a href="#nooutput-php440">The script just hangs when converting page containing images! With "render images" options disabled it works!</a></li><li><a href="#nooutput-limits">I've increased limits, but still sometimes get a blank page immediately after the script starts! Some sites are parsed, though...</a></li><li><a href="#nooutput-firefox">I'm getting "PDF doesn't start with "%PDF-" message from Acrobat Reader. Nevertheless, when I save file to my hard drive, it opens perfectly. I'm using Firefox. </a></li><li><a href="#nooutput-cache">Some characters are displayed incorrectly or missing.</a></li><li><a href="#nooutput-file-protocol">I cannot fetch files from local hard disk using 'file' procolol.</a></li></ul></li><li><a href="#layout-broken">Broken layout.</a></li><ul><li><a href="#layout-broken-missing-characters">Some characters are missing in my PDFs on some Acrobat Reader versions / different OSes</a></li><li><a href="#layout-broken-width">Sites are cut-off on the right side when I'm using 640 pixels page width. What can I do?</a></li><li><a href="#layout-broken-pixelpoint-ratio">I've disabled the "Keep screen pixel/point ratio" option and the page layout is completely broken! What can I do?</a></li><li><a href="#layout-broken-black-images">Some images are rendered inside black rectangles!</a></li><li><a href="#layout-broken-horizontal-lines">Horizontal lines (e.g. line under the text) look like they consist of several parts with slightly different width.</a></li><li><a href="#layout-broken-absolute-positioned">My absolute-positioned content is cut at the last page</a></li></ul><li><a href="#output-customize">Customizing output.</a><ul><li><a href="#explicit-break">How could I make an explicit page break?</a></li><li><a href="#headers-footers">How could I add headers or footers to generated Postscript / PDF files?</a></li><li><a href="#hide-headers">I've added headers and footers to my HTML pages, but how I can prevent them from showing up in the browser?</a></li><li><a href="#hires-images">Is there a possibility to create pdf documents with more than 72dpi using html2ps?</a></li><li><a href="#css-media">Can I control media size / margins via CSS?</a></li></ul></li><li><a href="#api">Using script API.</a><ul><li><a href="#api-localfile">How could I convert HTML file from my local drive?</a></li><li><a href="#api-frommemory">How could I convert HTML contained in variable?</a></li><li><a href="#api-security">Can I convert a page using some authentication mechanism using the html2ps webinterface?</a></li><li><a href="#api-relative-path">I'm using API to convert files and images and / or CSS files seems to be ignored.</a></li></ul></li><li><a href="#fonts">Fonts. National symbols.</a><ul><li><a href="#fonts-nonstandard">How can I use fonts other than standard (Times, Helvetica and Courier)?</a></li><li><a href="#fonts-euro">Euro symbol is not displayed. </a></li><li><a href="#fonts-cyrillic-ps">Cyrillic symbols are not displayed in PS output</a></li><li><a href="#fonts-greek-tonos">Greek symbols with tonos are not displayed in PS output; all other greek symbols rendered normally.</a></li><li><a href="#fonts-eastern">Chinese (Japanese, Arabic, etc...) symbols do not show on the page. What I need to do?</a></li><li><a href="#fonts-ttf-cache">I've installed/updated True-Type fonts, but it seems that ... (some mysterious problem) ... happens</a></li></ul></li><li><a href="#forms">Interactive forms.</a></li><li><a href="#frames">Frames.</a></li><li><a href="#misc">Miscellaneous.</a><ul><li><a href="#misc-size">Is it possible to reduce the size of output PDF file?</a></li><li><a href="#misc-filename">Is it possible to use a custom file name when outputting the pdf file?</a></li></ul></li></ul><div style="border-top: solid black 1px; border-bottom: solid black 1px;"><h2 style="text-decoration: underline;">How would I report a bug?</h2><p>Use the <a href="http://www.tufat.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=59">support forum</a> of tufat.com.</p><p>Please, provide the following:<ul><li><code>phpinfo()</code> output;</li><li>script version (and information about applied patches, if any);</li><li>script parameters you're using for conversion;</li><li><b>full</b> HTML code of the page you're trying to convert.</li></ul>The will greatly reduce the time required for solving your issue. Thank you for understanding.</p></div><h2 id="installation">Installation.</h2><dl><dt id="installation-utilities">Does html2ps require any external utilities like ghostscript?</dt><dd>No. PHP with GD extension is sufficient to run conversion. You <em>may</em> use additionalextensions/utilities to use alternative output methods or to boost conversion speed a little bit, though.</dd><dt id="installation-commandline">Can I call this script from the command line?</dt><dd>Probably yes; check if your PHP support command line interface. Also, considerreading this article on php.net:<a title="Click to open article in new window" href="http://www.php.net/manual/en/features.commandline.php" target="_blank">Using PHP from the command line</a></dd><dt id="installation-version">How can I determine the script version?</dt><dd>Look in config.inc.php for HTML2PS_VERSION_MAJOR, HTML2PS_VERSION_MINOR and HTML2PS_SUBVERSION constants. The full version number isMAJOR.MINOR.SUBVERSION. If you cannot find these constants, you're using <em>very old</em> html2ps release.</dd></dl><h2 id="nooutput">No output at all. Broken output.</h2><dl><dt id="nooutput-regexp">I'm getting "Warning: DOMDocument::loadXML() [function.DOMDocument-loadXML]: Empty string supplied as input" error message in PHP 5.2.0 when attemting to convert some files</dt><dd>A new configuration parameter <tt>pcre.backtrack_limit</tt> was introduced in PHP 5.2.0. html2ps does the excessiveregexp usage; it is recommended to increase pcre.backtrack_limit value to 1000000.</dd><dt id="nooutput-utf8">Warning: DOMDocument::loadXML() [function.DOMDocument-loadXML]: Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding ....</dt><dd>The page you're trying to convert specifies UTF8 encoding in header / meta tag, but is face uses different encoding. You needto switch from "Autodetect" encoding to the real one (in most cases iso-8859-1 will do) if you want to convert such page.</dd><dt id="nooutput-php442">HTML2PS returns blank page. There's some strange messages in PHP error log, for example:<pre>Parent: child process exited with status 3221225477 -- Restarting.</pre>I'm using PHP 4.4.2 </dt><dd>It is a PHP 4.4.2 bug <a href="http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=36017">#36017</a>; there's no workaroundsexcept changing PHP version or writing your own fetcher without 'fopen' function calls.I would recommend either downgrading to earlier 4.4.x versions or installing PHP 5.</dd><dt id="nooutput-memory">All I'm getting is a blank page; no error messages in PHP error log. Whats happened?</dt><dd>The script is probably running out of memory or execution time. Try increasingthe values of <code>max_execution_time</code> and/or <code>memory_limit</code> PHP configuration variables.Recommended values are <strong>120</strong> seconds and <strong>32</strong> megabytes. Nevertheless, if you'reusing <em>VERY</em> big images, you'll probably need to increase these valueseven more.</dd><dd>Another cause may be a JavaScript or META redirect on page you're trying to convert. As HTML2PS script is not designedas interactive user agent, it will not follow such redirects for you. You may try to open the url in question in your browserand check if the URL will change when page finishes loading. In this case, just supply the final URL to the script.</dd><dd>Also, please note that domain.com and www.domain.com <em>may</em> point to different sites. In the worst case,domain.com (without 'www' part) may just ignore HTTP requests. On the other side, popular browsers try to guess correctURL; for example, when you enter 'something' to the address bar, they may try to get something.com or www.something.com.This may lead to problem similar to one described in previous paragraph; the solution is the same: open URL in browser andcheck it will change.</dd><dd>Yet another cause may be browser built-in timeout; in particular, Safari for Windows has a built-in timeout of 60 seconds. In this caseyou will not be able to get the PDF file if conversion takes more than a minute.</dd><dt id="nooutput-memory2">I got the following error message: <tt>Fatal error: Allowed memory size of … bytes exhausted (tried to allocate … bytes) in&hellip</tt></dt><dd>The script is running out of memory. Please refer to <a href="php.net/ini.core">memory_limit PHP.net documentation</a> regarding increasing memory limit.</dd><dt id="nooutput-php440">The script just hangs when converting page containing images! With "render images" options disabled it works!</dt><dd>There were reports on this problem on Windows recently. A quick investigation showed that for some reason PHP 4.4.0sometimes hangs indefinitely <em>inside</em> the 'fsockopen' call. Consider upgrading your PHP version in this case.</dd><dt id="nooutput-limits">I've increased limits, but still sometimes get a blank page immediatelyafter the script starts! Some sites are parsed, though...</dt><dd>Some users encountered this problem using the GD library bundled with PHP.While it matched the GD version requirement, it sometimes caused PHP to silentlydie on some images. The problem is solved by recompiling the PHP using theexternal (recent enough) GD library. Note that NOT ALL PHP configurationsare subject to this problem.</dd><dt id="nooutput-firefox">I'm getting "PDF doesn't start with "%PDF-" message fromAcrobat Reader. Nevertheless, when I save file to my hard drive, it opensperfectly. I'm using Firefox.<dd> There were user reports on issues related to Firefox/Acrobat Reader pluginincompatibility. In particular, this problem appeared with Firefox 1.0.7 andReader 6.0.2 PL. You may consider upgrading your software to latest versionsin this case.</dd><dt id="nooutput-cache">Some characters are displayed incorrectly or missing.</dt><dd><p>If you've installed, removed or changed font files, you may need to clear<tt>cache</tt> subdirectory. HTML2PS do store information extracted from file fontsthere to reduce script initialization overhead. See also"<a href="#fonts-ttf-cache">I've installed/updated True-Type fonts, but it seems that ... (some mysterious problem) ... happens</a>"<p>Another cause of this problem may be incorrect source encoding; when encoding is not explicilty specified,html2ps tries to take encoding from HTTP headers and META tags. If no encoding information found,html2ps assumes iso-8851-1.</dd><dt id="nooutput-file-protocol">I cannot fetch files from local hard disk using 'file' procolol.</dt><dd><p>First of all, please ensure you're providing URL, not the file path; for example, if you're trying to useimage from <tt>c:\foo\bar\baz.gif</tt>, you'll need to use the following URL: <tt>file:///C:/foo/bar/baz.gif</tt>.</p><p>Second, due the security reasons, files accessed via 'file' protocol are limited to html2ps directory by default. This restrictionis controlled by <tt>FILE_PROTOCOL_RESTRICT</tt> constant in the <tt>config.inc.php</tt> file. Note that this constantcontains <em>file path prefix</em>; for example, to use files from <tt>C:\images</tt> directory you'll need tostore <tt>C:\images\</tt> value in this constant.</dd></dl><h2><a name="layout-broken"></a>Broken layout.</h2><dl><dt id="layout-broken-missing-characters">Some characters are missing in my PDFs on some Acrobat Reader versions / different OSes</dt><dd>Try enabling font embedding (set 'embed' property in html2ps.config to value 1 for fonts used in your documents).</dd><dt id="layout-broken-width">Sites are cut-off on the right side when I'm using 640 pixels page width. What can I do?</dt><dd> Nothing. Treat this as a feature. Just increase the page width. Most sitesare <b>NOT</b> designed for such small resolutions and will cause a horizontalscrollbar to appear in browser in such cases. </dd><dt id="layout-broken-pixelpoint-ratio">I've disabled the "Keep screen pixel/point ratio" option and thepage layout is completely broken! What can I do?</dt><dd> Nothing. Treat this as a feature. If you want to get the layout close tothe image rendered by the browser, <b>never</b> disable this option. The onlytime you'll need it is when you need to render text having the <b>exact</b>size specified in points.</dd><dt id="layout-broken-black-images">Some images are rendered inside black rectangles!</dt><dd>PNG images with alpha channel are NOT supported. Swicth to single-color transparency, if you need it.</dd><dt id="layout-broken-horizontal-lines">Horizontal lines (e.g. line under the text) look like they consist of several parts with slightly different width.</dt><dd>Try disabling antialiasing in your PDF reader.</dd><dt id="layout-broken-absolute-positioned">My absolute-positioned content is cut at the last page</dt><dd>Note that absolute and fixed-positioned content do not generate page breaks (see CSS 2.1. 13.2.3 Content outside the page box). The simplestworkaround is to add static-positioned div with fixed height.</dd></dl><h2><a name="output-customize"></a>Customizing output.</h2><dl><dt><a name="explicit-break"></a>How can I make an explicit page break?</dt><dd>You may use <em>one</em> of the following HTML2PS script-specific commands:<pre><!--NewPage--><pagebreak/><?page-break></pre>Or CSS <em>page-break-after</em> property:<pre><div style="page-break-after: always">... some content ...</div></pre></dd><dt><a name="headers-footers">How should I add headers or footers to generated Postscript / PDF files?</a></dt><dd>You may use one of the following options:<ul><li>Use blocks with 'position: fixed'. Pleas note that you probably want toset 'top' and 'bottom' properties to negative values to avoid overlapping withmain content; it is an expected behavior according to HTML/CSS standards.(see also a simple <a href="samples/headfoot.html">sample</a>)</li><li>Use "Header" and "Footer" options in web interface orPreTreeFilterHeaderFooter filter in API</li><li>Use <a href="compatibility.css.3.html#marginboxes">CSS 3 margin boxes</a>.</li></ul>Note that when you use PreTreeFilterHeaderFooter or Header/Footer fields in web interface,content is implicitly placed in fixed-positioned div; you may think of this as follows:<pre>...<body><!--header starts--><div style="position: fixed; ....">...your header content...</div><!--header ends-->...your HTML content...<!--footer starts--><div style="position: fixed; ....">...your footer content...</div><!--footer ends--></body>...</pre><p><strong>Important note:</strong> HTML code added via PreTreeFilterHeaderFooter should be (almost) valid XHTML(see <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#diffs">XHTML 1.0: Differences with HTML 4</a>);in particular, all tags / attributes should be in lower case. <em>Almost</em> means that you don't need to specifywrapping <tt>html</tt>, <tt>head</tt> and <tt>body</tt> tags for the header content.</p></dd><dt><a name="hide-headers">I've added headers and footers to my HTML pages, but how I can prevent them from showing up in the browser?</a></dt><dd>Use @media css rules setting 'display: none' or 'display: block' for header/footer blocks on different media.</dd><dt><a name="hires-images"></a>Is there a possibility to create pdf documents with more than 72dpi using html2ps?</dt><dd>You may make a page with high-resolution images and set their on-page height and width using<code>height</code> and <code>width</code> attributes.HTML2PS does not resample images, just outputs them to PDF and provides the scaling factor.</dd><dt id="css-media">Can I control media size / margins via CSS?</dt><dd>Yes. Use <a href="compatibility.css.3.html#media">CSS 3 'size' and 'margin'</a> properties. In addition,html2ps provides '-html2ps-pixels' property which allows you to override 'pixels' value specifiedin pipeline configuration code.</dd><dt><a name="pages-batch"></a>##PAGES## directive always displays 1 in batch mode!</dt><dd>Yes, it is a documented feature. ##PAGES## always refer to the number of pages in file being processed.</dd></dl><h2 id="api">API</h2><dl><dt id="api-localfile">How could I convert HTML file from my local drive?</dt><dd>Use example file in <tt>samples/sample.simplest.from.file.php</tt> as a starting point.</dd><dt id="api-frommemory">How could I convert HTML code contained in a variable?</dt><dd>Use example file in <tt>samples/sample.simplest.from.memory.php</tt> as a starting point.</dd><dt id="api-security">Can I convert a page using some authentication mechanism using the html2ps webinterface?</dt><dd>Out-of-the-box – no. Depending on the type of the authentication you <em>may</em> override the fetcherobject with your custom one able to bypass authentication. Still, the <strong>recommended</strong> approachis html2ps API usage; in this case, you store your HTML code in a PHP variable instead of outputting it to the browserand call conversion engine directly.</dd><dt id="api-relative-path">I'm using API to convert files and images and / or CSS files seems to be ignored.</dt><dd>Most likely, you're using relative URLs and, at the same time, converting either HTML string from memory orlocal file. In this case script doesn't know the base URL to use while resolving relative paths, sothese URLs are ignored. You have two options in this case:<ul><li>Change relative URI to absolute in your HTML code</li><li>Implement 'get_base_url' function in the fetcher object you're using so it return valid meaningful value.</li></ul></dd></dl><h2 id="fonts">Fonts. National symbols.</h2><dl><dt id="fonts-nonstandard">How can I use fonts other than standard (Times, Helvetica and Courier)?</dt><dd>Follow these <a href="howto_fonts.html" target="_blank">instructions</a></dd><dt id="fonts-euro">Euro symbol is not displayed</dt><dd>First of all, check if you provided correct information on the file encoding to html2ps; encoding vectors containing euro symbol are'iso-8859-15', 'windows-1250', 'windows-1251' or 'windows-1252'. Alternatively, you may use UTF-8 or HTML entities&euro; or &8364;.</dd><dt id="fonts-cyrillic-ps">Cyrillic symbols are not displayed in PS output</dt><dd>Install <tt>sharatype-fonts</tt> package to your Ghostscript;the script is configured to use these fonts out-of-the-box.</dd><dt id="fonts-greek-tonos">Greek symbols with tonos are not displayed in PS output; all other greek symbols rendered normally.</dt><dd><ul><li>install the unicode postscript .pfb fonts (for example, from <a href="http://canopus.iacp.dvo.ru/~panov/cm-unicode/">http://canopus.iacp.dvo.ru/~panov/cm-unicode/</a>)</li><li>remove the following default 'encoding-override' section from .html2ps.config, as it make greek text to use by default 'Symbol' font lacking 'tonos' symbols:<pre><encoding-override name="iso-8859-7"><normal normal="Symbol" italic="Symbol" oblique="Symbol"/><bold normal="Symbol" italic="Symbol" oblique="Symbol"/></encoding-override></pre></li><li>update "fonts" (NOT "fonts-pdf") section to point to installed fonts, for example:<pre><fonts><family name="times"><normal normal="CMUSansSerif" italic="CMUSansSerif-Oblique" oblique="CMUSansSerif-Oblique"/></pre></li></ul></dd><dt id="fonts-eastern">Chinese (Japanese, Arabic, etc...) symbols do not show on the page. What I need to do?</dt><dd>First of all, you'll need fonts containing these symbols; in most casesdefault fonts bundled with Ghostscript or PDFLIB will contain only Western/CentralEuropean symbols. After you find fonts containing characters you need, youshould install them instead of the standard fonts, using the answer for thisquestion <a href="#fonts">«How can I use fonts other than standard (Times,Helvetica and Courier)?»</a></dd><dt id="fonts-ttf-cache">I've installed/updated True-Type fonts, but it seems that ... (some mysterious problem) ... happens</dt><dd>First of all, clean a "parsed fonts" cache in 'fpdf/font' subdirectory (just remove all files). This couldsolve most font-related issues.</dd></dl><h2><a name="forms"></a>Interactive forms</h2><dl><dt>When I try to submit the form, Acrobat responds with a "Cannot handle content type: …" message.</dt><dt>Every time I submit the form, I get a strange-looking result page in by browser.</dt><dd>PDF interactive forms are not like HTML forms; you MUST modify the server-side script so it return FDF fileinstead of normal HTML in this case.See <a href="http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/pdf/index_reference.html" title="Opens PDF specifications download page at Adobe.com in new window">PDF Reference, v 1.6</a>, page 1026, par. 134 for futher information.Also, you may check <a href=""></a> for a brief outline of PDF forms.</dd></dl><h2><a name="frames"></a>Frames</h2><dl><dt>I have a page with frames containing a lot of text, but generated PDF contains only 1 page. Where's my content?</dt><dd>As produced PDFs are static, you have no ways to scroll frame content. Thus, only initially visible frame content will be available.It is a feature.</dd><dt>Some links inside the frames are not active even when I enable "Render Hyperlinks" option.</dt><dd>As was stated previously, script may render only a part of frame content. So, if rendered part contains a local hyperlinkpointing to non-rendered part, this hyperlink will be disabled, as it points to nowhere.</dd></dl><h2><a name="misc"></a>Miscellaneous</h2><dl><dt id="misc-size">Is it possible to reduce the size of output PDF file?</dt><dd>Yes. By default HTML2PS embeds fonts used during conversion in the generated PDF. You may disable this option bysetting 'embed' attribute to '0' for these fonts in html2ps.config. Note that it will probably cause problemswith national symbols on older versions of Acrobat Reader; also, this assumes that users have all fonts used in PDFfiles on their machines. Also, refer to the description of <a href="configuration.html#font_embedding_mode">FONT_EMBEDDING_MODE</a> configuration constant.</dd><dt>Is it possible to use a custom file name when outputting the pdf file? As of right now, the filename is long ugly string and doesn't look very clean.Can I pass the script a varible such as &saveas=thispdffile.pdf and use that for the file name when saving in the browser?</dt><dd>Yes. If you're using the web interface (html2ps.php file from distribution) you would need to replace<code>$g_baseurl</code> with <code>$_REQUEST['saveas']</code> in the following piece of code near the end of html2ps.php:<pre>switch ($g_config['output']) {case 0:$pipeline->destination = new DestinationBrowser($g_baseurl);break;case 1:$pipeline->destination = new DestinationDownload($g_baseurl);break;case 2:$pipeline->destination = new DestinationFile($g_baseurl);break;};</pre>Also please note that by default output file name can contain only latin letters, digits, '-' and '_' signs,any other symbols will be replaced by underscores;you may change this behavior by hacking the <code>filename_escape</code> function in <code>destination._interface.class.php</code>.<p>If you're using API, refer to DestinationBrowser/DestinationDownload/DestinationFile class documentation.</dd></dl></body></html>