Editing & page management

PdfDocumentEditor manipulates an existing compiled PdfDocument, enabling you to add, remove, reorder, rotate, and crop pages, and to inject headers or footers after the fact.

Creating an editor

From a PdfDocument built in memory:

use PhpPdf\Document\PdfDocumentEditor;

$editor = new PdfDocumentEditor($doc);

From a file on disk (combines reading and editing in one step):

use PhpPdf\Reader\PdfDocumentReader;

$editor = PdfDocumentEditor::fromReadDocument(
    PdfDocumentReader::open('/path/to/file.pdf')
);

Page operations

All page indices are 0-based.

// Remove a page
$editor->removePage(2);

// Move page 4 before page 1
$editor->movePage(from: 4, to: 1);

// Rotate a page (degrees: 0, 90, 180, 270)
$editor->rotatePage(0, 90);

// Crop a page (sets CropBox)
$editor->cropPage(0, x: 50, y: 50, width: 495, height: 742);

Adding pages from another document

use PhpPdf\Reader\PdfDocumentReader;

$source = PdfDocumentReader::open('/path/to/source.pdf');
$editor->insertPage($source->getPage(0), at: 2);

Injecting headers and footers

PdfDocumentEditor can add headers and footers to a document that was built without them, or replace existing ones.

$editor->header(function (PdfContentStreamBuilder $s, int $n, int $total): void {
    $s->beginText()
      ->setFont('F1', 8)
      ->setTextMatrix(Matrix::translate(72, 822))
      ->showText("Page $n of $total")
      ->endText();
});

$editor->footer(function (PdfContentStreamBuilder $s, int $n, int $total): void {
    $s->setLineWidth(0.25)
      ->moveTo(72, 45)->lineTo(523, 45)->stroke();
});

$result = $editor->build();

Fonts referenced in the closures must already exist in the source document.

Template import

Import a page from an existing PDF as a reusable background (Form XObject):

$letterhead = PdfDocumentReader::open('/path/to/letterhead.pdf');

(new PdfDocumentBuilder())
    ->page(function (PdfPageBuilder $page) use ($letterhead): void {
        $page
            ->size(...PdfPageSize::A4)
            ->useType1Font('F1', 'Helvetica')
            ->useImportedPage('TPL', $letterhead->getPage(0))
            ->content(function (PdfContentStreamBuilder $s): void {
                // Draw the letterhead first, then add content on top
                $s->drawImportedPage('TPL');
                $s->beginText()
                  ->setFont('F1', 12)
                  ->setTextMatrix(Matrix::translate(72, 680))
                  ->showText('Dear Customer,')
                  ->endText();
            });
    })
    ->build();

The imported page is embedded as a Form XObject and can be reused across multiple pages without duplicating its content stream.

Producing the result

$result = $editor->build();   // PdfDocument

$output = new PdfMemoryOutput();
(new PdfDocumentSerializer($output))->writeDocument($result);