FPDF is software written in PHP which allows you to export HTML pages to PDF. Follow these instructions to download and install FPDF. In this tutorial, I will explain how to use FPDF on a Linux Web server.

1. Download FPDF from http://www.fpdf.org/en/download.php.
2. Extract the contents of the tar gunzip using the following command. Notice this command moves the extracted folder to the Web server document root.

tar �-xvzf �/path/to/fpdf-version.tgz �-C �/path/to/web/server/root

3. Remove the origial tar gunzip file.

rm fpdf-version.tgz

Now that FPDF is installed, we can write HTML and PHP that will allow us to create PDF file from a website. First, let's create a HTML page with a textarea.

<form method="post" action="fpdf.php">
  <textarea name="content" id="content"> </textarea>
  <br />
  <input type="submit" value="create pdf">
</form>

Notice the HTML form passed content to fpdf.php. Create a file named fpdf.php with the following markup.

<?php
require('fpdf-version/fpdf.php');

$pdf = new FPDF();
$pdf->AddPage();
$pdf->SetFont('Arial','B',16);
$pdf->Cell(40,10,'Hello World!');
$pdf->Output();
?>

We can also write HTML and PHP that will allow us to export data to a PDF.  Let's say we have a page which is displaying data we have stored in a database. We can use a form to send the data to our page that will create the PDF. Notice in this example we are sending $data1 to export_pdf.php. This assume our page has created a varible named $data1.

<form method="post" action="export_pdf.php">
  <input type="hidden" name="short_summary" value="<?php echo $data1; ?>">
  <input type="Export to PDF">
</form>

The export_pdf.php page will then handle the creation of the PDF.

<?php
require('fpdf-version/fpdf.php');

$data1 = $_POST['data1'];

$pdf = new FPDF();
$pdf->AddPage();
$pdf->SetFont('Arial','B',16);
$pdf->Cell(40,10,$data1);
$pdf->Output('example.pdf', 'D');
?>

For more information, visit http://www.fpdf.org.