dreipc_pdf for TYPO3

When visitors want TYPO3 pages as PDFs, the result needs a layout of its own

Visitors click “Save as PDF” and expect a clean document: corporate design, logo, page numbers, no navigation clutter. What the browser’s print function delivers is the opposite: cut-off columns, superfluous headers and footers, missing images. The solution is a dedicated print layout that generates PDFs from TYPO3 page content, independent of how the page looks in the browser. dreipc_pdf is published neither in the TER nor on Packagist or GitHub, so its feature set cannot be verified. The following sections describe the approach such a solution takes in TYPO3.

Unlike EXT:web2pdf, which converts the rendered HTML page into a PDF with the PHP library mPDF, a data-driven approach works with templates of its own: it renders the content elements of a TYPO3 page through PDF templates and produces a formatted PDF from them. That gives you full control over margins, headers and footers, font sizes and page breaks.

Typical use cases

Product data sheets straight from the CMS. Machine builders, chemical companies and medical device manufacturers maintain their product data in TYPO3. Sales reps need this data as printable PDFs for customer visits. A data-driven PDF solution turns the TYPO3 product page into a PDF in the corporate layout: logo at the top, technical data in tables, product image, contact details at the bottom. For one client with 400 product pages, the PDFs are available automatically via a button on every page, with no manual work.

Press releases and annual reports. Communications departments publish press releases on the website and offer them as PDF downloads at the same time. The PDF solution generates the PDF when the download button is clicked, always based on the current content. No manual PDF creation, no risk of outdated downloads.

Information sheets from public authorities. Public institutions provide forms, fact sheets and information letters as PDFs. The content is maintained in TYPO3 and, whenever it changes, automatically delivered as an updated PDF. The PDF version has an official layout with the authority’s letterhead and file reference number.

Technical architecture

Such a solution uses a PHP PDF library such as mPDF or TCPDF for generation and registers a page type of its own in TYPO3. When a page is requested with the PDF type parameter (?type=123), a PDF file is generated and offered for download instead of the HTML output.

The rendering pipeline works in three steps. First, the solution reads the content elements of the requested TYPO3 page from the database. Second, it renders each element through a dedicated PDF Fluid template (not the standard web template). Third, it passes the rendered HTML string to mPDF/TCPDF, which produce the PDF with the configured page settings.

The PDF templates are Fluid templates with HTML/CSS that mPDF understands. mPDF supports a subset of CSS2 and CSS3: page margins (@page), headers and footers, tables, images, fonts (embeddable TTF fonts) and page breaks (page-break-before, page-break-after). Flexbox and Grid are not supported, so layout work is done with tables or floats.

The configuration covers page format (A4, Letter, custom), orientation (portrait/landscape), margins, default font, header and footer templates, and the mapping of content element types to PDF templates. Each content element can have its own PDF template that differs from its web presentation.

Common problems and solutions

Images missing from the PDF. mPDF loads images via HTTP. If the server runs behind a reverse proxy or in a Docker environment, mPDF cannot resolve its own image URLs. The fix: embed images via the local file path instead of the URL. In the PDF Fluid templates, use the absolute server path (/var/www/html/fileadmin/...) rather than the web address.

PDF generation is slow for complex pages. A page with 30 content elements and 15 images can take 5-10 seconds to render as a PDF. Concurrent requests put a strain on the server. The fix: cache the generated PDFs. On the first request, the PDF is generated and stored in the file system; subsequent requests receive the cached version. The cache is invalidated whenever the content changes.

Page breaks in the wrong places. mPDF breaks pages wherever the content exceeds the page height, even in the middle of a table or paragraph. The fix: set explicit page breaks in the PDF templates (<div style="page-break-before: always;">) and protect tables from breaking with <table style="page-break-inside: avoid;">.

Migration and version compatibility

dreipc_pdf is published neither in the TER nor on Packagist or GitHub. Which TYPO3 versions the extension supports therefore cannot be verified, and no update for current versions is publicly available.

The alternatives for TYPO3 v12/v13: EXT:web2pdf (converts the HTML page with mPDF, simpler, less control over the layout), EXT:pdfviewhelpers (ViewHelper-based, works with TCPDF), EXT:fluid_fpdf (Fluid templates with an FPDF backend) or a custom solution with mPDF as a Composer package. The custom solution offers full control and independence from third-party extensions.

If you migrate from an existing PDF extension to a custom solution, you can reuse existing PDF Fluid templates as long as they use mPDF-compatible HTML/CSS. The rendering wrapper has to be rewritten, but the templates stay. For a typical project with 5 PDF templates, the migration takes 2-3 days. Gosign has implemented PDF generation in TYPO3 with various libraries and recommends the right solution for each set of requirements.