PDF Certificate Generator

PHP script to generate certificates for participation in events.

This script uses TCPDF library to generate PDF's from HTML templates. Given a CSV file with person's details and data to be printed into PDF's file is possible create customized certificates including background images. There are a range of options (listed bellow) to customize certificates.

Dependencies

• TCPDF: PHP PDF Library.
• PHPMailer: a full-featured email creation and transfer class for PHP.
• GetOpt: a library for command-line argument processing.

Instalation

In order to install cerfiticate-generator you need to install Composer to handle dependencies. Then run composer install to download dependencies.

Creating a HTML template

The recommend way to create HTML template is using a HTML editor or a text editor. But it's also possible to use converting tools like ZAMZAR or PowerPoint2HTML to convert PowerPoint presentation to HTML.

The problem with using conversion tools is that sometimes the HTML created contains tags not handle by TCPDF and the generate PDF certificate will not work correctly. Be sure that you HTML template contains only TCPDF supported tags. Currently supported tags are: a, b, blockquote, br, dd, del, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, img, li, ol, p, pre, small, span, strong, sub, sup, table, tcpdf, td, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul NOTE: all the HTML attributes must be enclosed in double-quote. Refer to TCPDF documentation to get more details about supported tags.

CSS styles must be inline into HTML files in order to be handle by TCPDF.

HTML templace placeholders

It's possible to use placeholders in HTML template to be replaced by data from CSV files (see bellow). The placeholders must use the Jinja syntax, for example:

<p>{{ first_name }}</p>

for define placeholder for a "variable" called first_nameinside a HTML paragraph tag. The PHP script will search for any placeholder ({{ * }}) and replaces it by the value from a column with same name in the CSV file provided as argument to the script (-d option, see bellow).

A special placeholder {{ %now% }} is available and will be replaced by the current date when generating certificates.

Creating a PDF certificate

The main file of Certificate Generator is certgen.php. To get a list of available options run:

php certgen.php --help

Options

There are a set of options available to customize the certificate generator that should be passed at command line:

• -i or --input (required): the HTML template file with placeholders in Jinja format (e.g.: {{ first_name }}).
• -o or --output: PDF output file/directory (default: output.pdf).
• -dor --data: CSV file with header at first line that will be used as source to replace placeholders in HTML template. The header (column) names must be the same as in template HTML.
• -p or --page: the page size (default: 'A4').
• -eor --email_col: the email column's name in CSV data file (default: email). If a column with that name is present in CSV file then the generated certificates will be sent to attendants emails.
• -s or --subject: the subject of emails sent to attendants (default: Certificate).
• -m or --message: a text or a path to file with the message (body) of the email sent to attendants (default: Here is yoor certificate).
• -ror --replyto: the email to set as reply to (default: [email protected]).
• -aor --attach: addiotional attachments to sent in emails. You can provide as many attachments you want by provinding multiple arguments for this parameter (e.g. -a path-to-attachment-1.pdf -a path-to-attachment-2.txt).
• -y or --offset: Y offset of HTML cell (defaul: 0).
• ? or --help: show help and quit.
• -f or --font: add a font to TCPDF and quit (do not generate certificates).

Add a font to TCPDF

The TCPDF comes with a limited number of fonts. To convert and add a new font to TCPDF you can use the options -f or --font of Certificate Generator script. For example to add the Ubuntu-Light font to TCPDF you can use the follow command:

php certgen.php -f Ubuntu-Light.ttf

In case of success you will received a message with the font name's that should be used in configuration file (see bellow) replacing the DEFAULT_FONT constant.

Font added: ubuntumedium
Change DEFAULT_FONT value to ubuntumedium in config.php to use the new font!

Configuration file

The are a number of configurations that can be customized in inc/config.php file. Edit this file if as you need to customize script settings.

• DEFAULT_FONT: default font used to generate PDF (default: helvetica).
• DEFAULT_FONT_SIZE: default font size (default: 18).
• SMTP_DEBUG: PHPMailer SMTP debug flag (default: false).
• CHARSET: Email encoding charset (defulat: UTF-8).
• MAIL_HOST: SMTP host (default: stmp.gmail.com).
• MAIL_PORT: SMTP port (default: 587).
• SMTP_AUTH: Use SMTP Authentication (default: true).
• SMTP_SECURE: Use SMTP TLS encryptation (default: tls).
• MAIL_USERNAME: SMTP user name (default: [email protected]).
• MAIL_PASSWORD: SMTP password (default: password123).
• HTML_BODY: Enable email HTML body (default: true).
• SMTP_ALIVE: Keep SMTP connection alive (default: true).
• MEMORY_LIMIT: Memory limit (default: 512M).
• LOCALE: locale (default: en_US).
• DELIMITER: CSV file delimmiter (default: ,).
• MARGIN_LEFT : PDF left margin (default: 40).
• MARGIN_RIGHT : PDF right margin (default: 40).

Examples:

See examples files in examples folder:

php certgen.php -i sample.html -o ./output/ -d sample.csv -s "Thanks for participated of our event" -e "participant_email" -m sample_email_message.html -r [email protected] -a sample_attach.txt

The command above will generates a PDF certificate for each attendant listed in sample.csv file and send the certificates and the addiotional sample_attach.txt to attendants emails which are in the CSV file at the column participant_email. The subject of the email sent will be Thanks for participated of our eventand the message from the file sample_email_message.html. The reply to will be set to [email protected].

Contributing

Please submit bug reports, suggestions and pull requests to the GitHub issue tracker.

If you found a mistake in the docs, or want to add something, go ahead and amend the wiki - anyone can edit it.

License

Certificate-Generatoris publised under GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE v3.0.